Preventive and Predictive Genetics

Pharmacogenomics turns knowledge drawn from the genome into everyday clinical care, with benefits for individual patients and for healthcare systems as a whole. Clinicians have traditionally made diagnostic and treatment decisions by relying on broad factors such as age, sex and body weight, and by estimating the risks and likely results that go with them. Advances in genetics and genomics now give providers far richer information, allowing them to prevent and diagnose illness, choose treatments, and forecast outcomes more precisely.

Such precision has practical advantages for patients. When a therapy is matched to the patient group most likely to respond, it can be selected with greater confidence, unnecessary prescriptions can be avoided, and the chance of adverse drug reactions can be lowered. Reliable prediction of how a patient will fare supports better overall management of care.