To answer those questions, let´s take the following example; when a person is diagnosed as hypertensive, there is an anxiety filled, sometimes costly, trial and error process to find out what is the best treatment. The patient must try several medicines, different diets with or without salt, and exercise. Basically the Physician will end up trying different combinations of all of the above until he finds what is best for the patient.
In the future you will go to your doctor who will take a drop of your blood, put it into a machine, and ask you to come back the next day. Inside the machine there is a biochip to which are attached thousands of single stranded pieces of DNA, called oligonucleotides, capable of reacting with specific sequences of your DNA. Through those thousands of reactions a very important part of your genotype will be spelled out.
As an example of the power of this technique, to your right , you have on a chip the whole yeast genome. Each spot represents a fragment of DNA. If you want to take a look at the original picture go to The Full Yeast Genome on a Chip (figure used with permission from Patrick O. Brown, M.D.,Ph.D.-Associate Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Associate Professor, Stanford University Department of Biochemistry)
How are they going to tailor medicines exclusively for you?
The next day when you come back, your doctor will tell you something like this: "Juan, your genome analysis indicates that you have three particular gene variants (also called gene polymorphisms) relevant to your hypertension.
According to those gene variants he will give you a list of the drugs you can benefit from and those you should stay away from. He could also tell you that your hypertension is salt-insensitive, which means that you can eat salt with no adverse consequences.
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