Tailor made pharmaceuticals

Better genetic information is beginning to reveal why some drugs work for some people but not for others. (Here's a CBS Marketwatch story, requires free subscription). In addition to the heath benefits, there are some political-economic benefits to better understanding of how drugs interact with personal chemistry.

Drugs that benefit a minority of the population are sometimes not approved by the FDA because their side-effects for the majority are deemed to outweigh the expected benefits. But if we can identify more clearly who the drugs will benefit and who they will harm, more drugs will be deemed safe and will get through the FDA process. As a further result, the costs of drug development will be reduced.

Genetic information can also help to avoid the opposite error. It often happens that in a clinical trial a drug doesn't look beneficial overall but does appear to work in some subpopulation (e.g. African-Americans with disease of type X that has progressed to stage y). The danger is that some results like this are bound to occur by chance alone and thus do not necessarily imply true efficacy. If we can show that the subpopulations do (or do not) have systematic genetic differences from the majority population, however, we can rule out (or rule in) chance as an explanation and better separate the wheat from the chaff.

Thanks to Jim Coomes (a long-time reader from Pattaya, Thailand!) for the link.