Medicine tailored to your genome, not your race: Venter

PARIS  - Personalised, genome-based health care could help prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths caused each year by adverse drug reactions, genetics pioneer Craig Venter said Tuesday.

A new era of affordable gene sequencing will also render obsolete the practice of testing drugs on various ethnic groups, he said in a commentary, published by the London-based Nature Publishing Group.

Currently, clinical trials for medications often compare results across different racial groups.  One new compound, BiDil, is specifically designed for African Americans with heart disease.