By Ben Blanquera, TechLife Ohio – January 03, 2011 at 07:18PM
If the promise of personalized medicine ever comes to fruition, Ohio State University Medical Center looks well-positioned to reap the rewards.
Five years ago, OSU established the Center for Personalized Health Care, which is dedicated to education and research to advance personalized medicine. Earlier this year, OSU joined the Seattle-basedInstitute for Systems Biology to create the P4 Medicine Institute, another organization aimed at advancing the field.
While a standard definition of personalized medicine may be hard to come by, the term generally refers to tailoring patients’ treatment regimens to their own genetic and molecular signatures. The concept is important because some estimate that about half the amount spent onprescription drugs in the U.S. is wasted because, for various reasons, certain drugs simply don’t and won’t work on certain patients.