BioHackersNetThe holy grail of MolecularDiagnosis - the ability to stratify patient groups into the exact subsets required to respond to a drug that a pharmaceutical company spent a lot of money researching and marketing.
The problem expected to cause the most combinatoric ... diversity here is GeneticHeterogeneity.
The ideal, which is not very likely even with no complexity issues, is a "LocusHeterogeneity-AllelicHeterogeneity-specific-cocktail" admininstered daily to each patient, whether or not they are sick.
Though unlikely, this is the utopia that the pharmaceutical companies envisage for themselves...
The more feasible and more wellness-oriented system would discover the fundamental distinctions within a patient's potential response profiles to figure out what the one most palliative medicine would be.
One case study illustrating this point (presented by KlausLindpaintner at the BeyondGenome conference on 4 June 2002), is [Herceptin].
Inequalities and individualized medicine
By Charles R. Cantor, PhD
"The great [SNP] race has started.
"Over the next few years a number of competing groups - my own company, Sequenom, among them -- will sort through the diverse genetic material of the human species to find those variations called SingleNucleotidePolymorphism's (SNPs, pronounced SNIPS) that predispose individuals to major clinical disorders.
"The major impact of the SNP race should be to reduce the cost of medical care throughout the bulk of a lifetime. Cost savings will come from identifying SNPs that confer on individuals little or no risk for common diseases.
"Once identified, such individuals need not be further tested for such diseases unless strongly contraindicating risks are present. Cost savings resulting from reduced testing with negative outcomes can be considerable..."