Getting to the Heart of Precision Medicine: Embracing Genetic Diversity

At the heart of precision medicine is taking into consideration that each person is unique. Two people with the same disease can have very different outcomes depending on their specific genetic milieu, a complication that is largely overlooked in research and therapeutics. Clement Chow, Ph.D., assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Utah, explains why science has been slow to acknowledge genetic variation, and describes his research on how an individual’s overall genetic makeup influences manifestation of retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes blindness. Learn more in his review “Bringing genetic background into focus” and read about his retinitis pigmentosa research in Human Molecular Genetics.