The University of Florida Academic Health Center has become the latest facility to use the genetic information of patients to deliver personalized care.
Patients of the facility will undergo a genetic test in the form of a blood draw, which can be analyzed to determine whether the patient has any of the seven known genetic variations that suggest that the common anti-clotting drug clopidogrel would function effectively.
"In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration changed clopidogrel's label to warn clinicians that it may not work for high-risk heart patients with certain genetic traits," university official Julie Johnson said in a release. "But, there hasn't been a good way to get genetic information to doctors so they can use it during treatment."
The promise of personalized medicine has always been that doctors will eventually be able to use a patient's unique genetic information to better inform the treatment strategies they use on these individuals. Whether that means estimating when and if a person will become afflicted with a condition or predicting how a patient will respond to a particular treatment depends on the patient, but there is immense value in simply knowing this information.
University of Florida doctors are hopeful that these new testing procedures will ensure that doctors make the proper prescription recommendations, so that complications become less prevalent. Researchers also plan to collect genetic variations from patients, with the eventual goal being to use that information for future clinical research.
Of course, the University of Florida and any other diagnostic laboratories that adopt this approach of saving patient data need to ensure that such information is being adequately protected from unauthorized breaches. Patient privacy is an ongoing issue in the industry, which this blog has reported on before. For that reason, laboratories should turn to a recruitment agency that has experience identifying the best talent the industry has to offer.
This article is brought to you by Slone Partners, a leading laboratory recruitment firm in the emerging sciences of molecular, clinical, and in-vitro diagnostics, anatomic pathology and personalized medicine.
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