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…