ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Personalized medicine has been a high-level goal in medical/scientific circles for years, but now it’s entering the real world of patient care in important ways, thanks in part to new genomics tools.
A big driver of that transformation is next-generation sequencing (NGS), which has seen constant and dramatic improvements in technology and cost. As a result, laboratories that perform gene sequencing are increasingly taking NGS technology beyond research applications and into the clinical decision-making arena. (To underscore this rapid evolution, on May 27, the New England Journal of Medicine published a special report online on genomic testing and NGS, focusing on its enormous promise in the clinic as well as gaps in regulation and the quality of scientific evidence behind many currently used tests.)
