The problem with medicine’s one-size-fits-all approach is that it doesn’t account for the subtle variations in our genes that make each one of us unique. By 2012, though, your general practitioner may be better equipped. In what’s being touted as the “era of personalized medicine,” newborn babies would have their genomes etched in microchips. This information would allow doctors to tailor drugs, diets and treatments to each person’s particular genome, avoiding drug fatalities, zeroing in on disease-prevention strategies and helping us all lead healthier lives. “Ten years from now we are going to look back and say that what we were working with today is downright primitive,” says Claire Fraser, president of the Institute for Genomic Research.
Personalized genomics will alert doctors to dozens of inherited risk factors for a wide range of diseases. By the time symptoms of diabetes have appeared, for example, the pancreas has already suffered damage. Knowing at birth if a patient is predisposed to the disease would give doctors a chance to preempt its onset with therapies or medications. Drug companies are also pouring billions into “pharmacogenomics”–an effort to take the guesswork out of prescribing drugs. In treating patients with high blood pressure, doctors now choose from about 100 different medications, trying one at a time to see which works best at what dosage with the fewest side effects. If doctors could predict how a specific molecule will interact with a patient’s genes, they might avoid this kind of trial-and-error medicine.
Diets may also fall under the sway of genomics. These days doctors warn against eating too much salt or fat to stave off hypertension and heart disease, but this advice doesn’t apply to everybody–some people could eat a dozen eggs a day without raising their cholesterol levels. “Nutrigenomics” researchers hope to do away with such blanket generalizations and instead target diets to specific people. In a decade, the notion of a single “recommended daily allowance” of nutrients could be obsolete, says Jose M. Ordovas, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston. Instead, nutritionists will offer 20 or 30 different diets depending on whether you’re predisposed to obesity, heart disease or some other condition. The goal, says Ordovas, is “to live the maximum years with the maximum quality.” That’s one prescription that works for everybody.
