As the price of genetic testing continues to fall and the value of the information we’re getting from those tests continues to rise, there’s one fundamental question: When are we going to start regularly using genomic testing in medicine?
When will surgeons test every tumor to see if it shows genetic markers that indicate that a patient’s siblings should be tested for the same cancer? When will doctors routinely prescribe specific drugs because a patient’s genes indicate that they will work?
In an article published May 13 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the authors argue that while doctors are already incorporating these kinds of genetic testing tools sporadically, they’re actually far more ready to start using them routinely than many think.
In 2013, the Nature journal Genetics in Medicine published an article titled “Implementing genomic medicine in the clinic: the future is here,” where the authors wrote that the early adopters using this technology are far enough along that if they were to collaborate more, it could be a massive benefit to patients. We’re ready, the authors said then, to start implementing this technology on a larger scale.
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Yet there’s still the idea that genetic testing is somehow different from other new medical tests and that we should be cautious before using it.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: We’re about to enter a new era in medicine
