Don’t get me wrong. I would prefer the southern populist who wants to go after some real bad guys. But even John and Elizabeth Edwards might take heart from this pioneering legislation offered by Barack Obama.
Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2006 (Introduced in Senate)
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(2) Personalized medicine is the application of genomic and molecular data to better target the delivery of health care, facilitate the discovery and clinical testing of new products, and help determine a patient’s predisposition to a particular disease or condition.
(3) Many commonly-used drugs are typically effective in only 40 to 60 percent of the patient population.
(4) In the United States, up to 15 percent of hospitalized patients experience a serious adverse drug reaction, and more than 100,000 deaths are attributed annually to such reactions.
(5) Pharmacogenomics has the potential to dramatically increase the efficacy and safety of drugs and reduce healthcare costs, and is fundamental to the practice of genome-based personalized medicine.
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(7) The cancer drug Gleevec was developed based on knowledge of the chromosomal translocation that causes chronic myelogenous leukemia, which is characterized by an abnormal growth in the number of white blood cells. The mean 5-year survival for affected patients who are treated with Gleevec is 95 percent, which contrasts to a 5-year survival of 50 percent for patients treated with older therapies…
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/…
BFD you think?
You might want to think again.
The headless, heedless, heartless wonders at the FDA don’t have a clue. The can casually kill more people at a single sitting than a George Bush or Saddam Hussein can in a lifetime. They are treated as divines by the scientific and mathematical illiterates that populate Congress. Their allies are Big Pharma, Ralph Nader and the MSM.
“80% of men at 80 have prostate cancer,” said mathematician/medical doctor Barnhill. I been meaning to check that figure but don’t want to for some reason. Maybe it is because I ain’t no spring chicken, just an old chicken. Dr. Barnhill wants to get tests to market to tell which prostate tumors are cancer, which are aggressive, which should be let alone (most of them) so some old men need not needlessly wear diapers for their remaining years. Others would end mammograms with a blood or urine test. Might even detect the breast cancers that are missed by mammograms (which is most of them).
Even more important are the biomarkers that can treat people as if they are real people rather than standardized commodities.
The one-size-fits-all political scientists at the FDA make stabs occasionally at doing something innovative but it is just not their kind of thing.
How come others haven’t tackled these things?
Surely you jest. Can you picture, for instance, a Sen. Ted Stevens going from discussing the internet tubes to pharmacogenomics?
Best, Terry
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This isn’t real sexy stuff like inspiring talk about hope and such.
When we went to an early organizing meeting for Barack Obama, we had to shamefully admit we hadn’t read his books, never even heard him speak. We weren’t thrilled to our tingling toes with all the fine talk and heroic phrases because we never even heard them. Tell you the truth we didn’t even know O’bama was Irish.
Plumb embarrassing it was.
How would you like to have been mumbling something about pharmacogenomics to a motley crowd of starry-eyed accolytes seeking more members for the congregation?
Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as trying to explain baseload power to Al Gore but too damn close.
Possibly there is hope for a guy that likes to talk a lot about hope.
Best, Terry
is being weighted toward genetics,discovering new tumor markers, manipulating proteins, and coming up with targeted therapies these days. It is expensive, exhaustive work.
I wouldn’t blame the FDA for drug reactions much though they are not my favorite people. People can have reactions to drugs they previously did not react to. People can also have reactions to drugs that aren’t often associated with severe reactions and do fine with drugs known to have severe reactive qualities. The rule in medicine is to expect the unexpected with those things, plan for them. Most drug reactions happen within the first five minutes of administration.
one of my best friends heads the group at a major pharma company and has been working to loosen the way in which it’s applied
to grow the thinking of the establishment… god, these types really do say… but but but we never did it that way: we’ve done it this way for 20 years and we know that way and blah blah blah
incredible for scientists huh? but that’s what happens when you business people are in charge of them