How much has precision medicine helped? A new NCI study offers clues but provokes skeptics
Does precision medicine work?
The approach, based on finding a drug to target a patient’s specific genes, has undoubtedly saved individual lives, spurring Lazarus-like reversals in health in once-terminally ill patients. But critics have pointed out that its pursuit has meant drug companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to target mutations that affect narrow slices of the populations, and that many of the gains researchers thought it would bring have eroded as cancers evolve resistance.
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