Look How Far Precision Medicine Has Come
Skeptics say drugs based on genetic insights have underdelivered. But look carefully and they’re everywhere
By Antonio Regalado
Sometime this fall, the number of people who have spit in a tube and sent their DNA to the largest consumer DNA testing companies, like Ancestry and 23andMe, is likely to top 20 million. The list by now is certain to include some of your classmates and neighbors. If you are just tuning in, this figure will seem huge. And you might wonder: how did we get here?
The answer is little by little. The number of people getting DNA reports has been doubling, roughly, every year since 2010. The figures are now growing by a million each month, and the DNA repositories are so big that they’re enabling surprising new applications. Consumers are receiving scientific predictions about whether they’ll go bald or get cancer. Investigators this year started using consumer DNA data to capture criminals. Vast gene hunts are under way into the causes of insomnia and intelligence. And 23andMe made a $300 million deal this summer with drug company GlaxoSmithKline to develop personalized drugs, starting with treatments for Parkinson’s disease. The notion is that targeted medicines could help the small subset of Parkinson’s patients with a particular…
