The White House Is Pushing Precision Medicine, but It Won’t Happen for Years

With the right technologies to collect and make sense of biomedical information, we could speed up the pace of discoveries that lead to a new class of tailor-made drugs. That’s the argument behind the White House’s push for “precision medicine” (see “A Shot in the Arm for Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative”).

The goal of precision medicine is to provide drugs and therapies that are uniquely suited to individual patients based on their genetics and other distinguishing health information. To a small degree, that already is happening. Dozens of targeted drugs have gotten approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in recent years, and there are particularly successful examples in oncology. But despite the early successes, we are many years from realizing a “new era of medicine” the president described in his 2015 State of the Union address—if we can realize it at all. 

Here are four reasons why:

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