Pharmacogenetics — Tailoring Treatment for the Outliers

Abstract

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science and not an art.— Sir William Osler (1892)Over the past half century, biomedical science has developed randomized, controlled clinical-trial methods that can distinguish treatment effects from the noise of human variability. Positive results from tests of a treatment in a randomized, controlled trial provide great confidence that an intervention improves a prespecified outcome in a population defined by explicit entry criteria. These methods are rightly venerated because they have helped move medicine from anecdote to science and have largely brought about . . .