Precision Medicine is Coming, But Not Anytime Soon

President Obama’s announcement of a Precision Medicine Initiative was one of the few items in this year’s State of the Union address to garner bipartisan support. And for good reason. Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, offers the promise of health care — from prevention to diagnosis to treatment — based on your unique DNA profile. Who wouldn’t want that?

We’ve already had a taste of precision medicine. Relatively low-tech therapies like eyeglasses, orthotic devices, allergy treatments, and blood transfusions have long been personalized for the individual. Genetic analysis of tumors is now routine, spawning new medications like Herceptin trastuzumab (Herceptin) for breast cancer.

The Precision Medicine Initiative aims to ramp up customized medical care exponentially. It calls for increased funding to accelerate sequencing of a million people’s genomes — the entire array of an individual’s genes. With that information in hand, the initiative will be able to develop more effective treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Getting to precision care will require new diagnostic tests to decipher some or all of a person’s genome. These tests...