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.
Venter and three scientists from the Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland vigorously defend the focus on minorities in drug studies, but argue that race-based medicine should be seen only as an imperfect stop-gap measure. “Practitioners can now go beyond therapy on the basis of ethnicity into the pricisely targeted arena of personal genomics,” they write.
The high degree of genetic diversity within single ethnic groups, they point out, shows that assumptions about shared traits are deeply flawed.
To underscore the point, the scientists compared the genetic makeup of two Caucasian men whose entire genomes have been sequenced â€" American biologist James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for co-discovering the structure of DNA, and Venter himself.