The coming pharmacogenomics revolution: tailoring drugs to fit patients' genetic profiles

The opportunity for increased precision in pharmaceutical therapy will represent one of the important legacies of the Human Genome Project. Medical researchers have long suspected that genetic differences account for some of the variability in patient response to drugs, but now they hope that the identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms will allow physicians to customize pharmaceutical interventions. Pharmacogenomics will lead to fundamental changes in how drugs are discovered, tested, manufactured, labeled, and marketed. Federal regulators, the courts, and other policy makers will face challenges in accommodating these changes, and, in turn, their responses may have important impacts on the maturation and diffusion of this technology. This Article describes these scientific developments as a prelude to asking whether legal institutions will manage to catch up to or, instead, hinder such advances.