How long will it take to achieve White House’s precision medicine goals?

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

[D]espite the early successes, we are many years from realizing a “new era of medicine” the president described in his 2015 State of the Union address—if we can realize it at all.

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[First,] [a] number of new drugs aimed at cancers characterized by particular abnormalities have…emerged [since the first precision medicine]. But not every patient with the target abnormalities responds to these drugs, and the reasons for that are not understood.

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[T]he commercialization of diagnostic tests…has outpaced the underlying science[.] Though high-quality tests are…available, many of the products on the market are questionable.

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These advanced sequencing tests can cost thousands of dollars, and the questions about their accuracy and clinical validity make insurance companies hesitant to pay for them.

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[Finally,] [p]erhaps the biggest impediment to precision medicine is that so few people have gotten their genome, or their tumor’s genome, sequenced. That makes it difficult to find enough people to participate in clinical trials for new precision drugs, and limits the pace of scientific progress.

Read full, original post: The White House Is Pushing Precision Medicine, but It Won’t Happen for Years