Me and My Metabolism: Personalized medicine takes new direction
Physicians may someday predict a drug’s toxic effects in individual patients on the basis of their metabolisms, a proof-of-principle study in rats suggests. The finding could lead to a major shift in expectations for personalized medicine, which scientists generally have presumed would center on genetics.
Since people can vary widely in how they react to a particular medication type or dosage, many doctors consider personalized treatment to be one of medicine’s loftiest goals. Efforts to reach this end have focused mostly on pharmacogenomics, the study of how a person’s unique pattern of genes affects how he or she responds to any given drug.