All that we would ever desire to know, has always existed

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http://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i8/Shaky-New-Age.html?h=-1059264954&utm_content=buffer808f5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 



News last month that Illumina, a genome-sequencing technology firm, had gotten the price of sequencing the full human genome down to $1,000 was hailed as a great leap forward for drug research. Low-cost sequencing is considered crucial to the medical breakthroughs promised by the initial decoding of the human genome in 2000. Such breakthroughs are already occurring in cancer research and elsewhere in the form of targeted therapies—drugs designed to work on patients with specific genetic attributes.

The drive for cures tailored to an individual patient’s biology, known as personalized medicine, also relies heavily on genomics research. Technological advances and successes with new drugs have bred optimism among drugmakers and regulators that the world has entered a new age in medical research.

“I am here to declare victory, the coming of age of this vision, this technology,” Janet Woodcock, head of the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation & Research, told attendees at an event sponsored by the Personalized Medicine Coalition last May. “Targeted therapies have reached the mainstream.”

Many industry watchers, however, believe it is way too early in the game to be declaring anything like victory. Despite the growing number of drugs known to work with subsets of patients, critics see little headway on the ultimate vision of tailoring therapies to individual patients. Drug discovery efforts, they say, have been too narrowly focused on genomics, without enough regard for the patient information—phenotypic data—that informs about environmental influences.

Is this another case of spending a lot of time, money and human resources asking the wrong questions? 
Or a large step in new good direction. 
Given the poor track record of throwing gobs of money spent on this fixing the problem with more science kind of thinking since WW2 without actually addressing the actual issues, this will be interesting.