Drugs Tailored to Your Genes

Your future relationship with medicine is going to change dramatically thanks to genetic testing which will allow physicians to tailor drug therapy to individuals and help develop more precise and potent drugs, researchers say.

University of California-San Francisco genetics professor Ira Herskowitz told an American Medical Association meeting that understanding the genetic basis of drug response and disease will make it possible to tailor safe and effective therapies for different subsets of patients and will also provide valuable information on the genetic makeup of a disease (or subset of that disease) to target therapy directly to that disease.

Genetic testing's original promise was thought to be the ability to provide information on whether a person is at risk for succumbing to a particular disease. In the not-too-distant future, it will provide information for more directed and individualized therapy, Herskowitz says.

Genetic tests will be developed to show who may be susceptible to adverse side effects of a particular drug or who may benefit from a higher or lower dose of a drug.