When genomics medicine burst on the scene a decade ago, it seemed to promise all sorts of medical breakthroughs, including techniques to predict disease based on a patient's genes and ways to tailor medications to individual patients.
But it turns out the research also produced false starts, including a series of what seemed to be path-breaking studies from Duke University that later had to be retracted.
Now the Institute of Medicine, one of the government's top watchdogs on health care issues, is urging medical researchers to be more careful in their genetic research before moving it to clinical trials with real patients. Here's an excerpt from the IOM statement and a link to the full study:
"The request for the IOM report stemmed in part from a series of events at Duke University in which researchers claimed that their genomics-based tests were reliable predictors of which chemotherapy would be most effective for specific cancer patients. Failure by many parties to detect or act on problems with key data and computational methods underlying the tests led to the inappropriate enrollment of patients in clinical trials, premature launch of companies, and retraction of dozens of research papers.''
Read the IOM report here.
