A new genre of diagnostic tests – which determine whether a medicine is right for a patient’s genes – are paving the way for increased use of personalized medicine, according to the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.
Celia Henry Arnaud, C&EN senior editor, points out that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved several precedent-setting cancer drugs that provide a glimpse of the “personalized” medical care that awaits patients with cancer and other diseases in the future. Personalized medicine involves selecting treatments that work best with the set of genes present in each individual person. Such treatments work only for patients with conditions related to mutations, or alterations, in certain genes.
View the original article here: Get ready for a new genre of medical tests for the era of personalized medicine
