Researchers Detail Challenges of Personalized Medicine in Colloquium at AAAS

Despite some successes in the increasingly intense search for very specific molecular signposts of disease, the era of medicine custom-tailored to a patient’s own genetic profile is not yet at hand and faces significant scientific and policy hurdles.

That was the consensus at a recent two-day colloquium at AAAS on the future of personalized medicine. Researchers and clinicians still are grappling with how best to translate advances in genetics, molecular biology and imaging techniques into clear benefits for patients.

While doctors have always considered individual factors such as lifestyle and family history when recommending treatment, the decoding of the human genome in 2000 and advances in brain imaging have set the stage for sweeping changes in the practice of medicine. But even some of the successful diagnostic tests have had mixed results, experts said at AAAS, and there is a complicated regulatory picture that has meant varying quality in the development and validation of such tests.

The 1-2 June colloquium, co-organized by the AAAS Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program and the Food and Drug Law Institute, paid particular attention to the quest for biomarkers—molecular signposts for disease or a patient’s response to a drug. To learn more, read the full story.