Directed by Amalia Issa, PhD

This program promotes informed health care decision-making by advancing knowledge of the effectiveness of pharmaceutical products, services, and policies, with a particular focus on personalized medicine technologies. The goal of the rapidly evolving field of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine is to tailor treatments to patients based on their unique genetic make-up, preferences, and responses to treatment.

The concept of tailoring a patient’s treatment is not new. Doctors and patients often engage in a process of trial and error to find the right medicine to alleviate a particular patient’s condition while minimizing undesirable side effects. Numerous factors—genetic differences, environmental influences, diet, competing co-morbidities—affect which drug works best in a specific patient.

Sequencing of the human genome now allows us to investigate in more detail the genetic differences among patients and populations, and the effects of those differences on a person's response to a drug. However, for most genomic researchers, "personalized medicine" means that patients will still be assessed and treated based on information gleaned from studies of groups or populations—just with more precisely defined groupings of patients, from which it is hoped that clinical predictability will be improved for individuals in those groups.

At the Abramson Center, we believe that the personalization of medicine can be practiced more precisely than that. While it is unlikely that genomics alone will ever afford us a one-to-one prediction between the genetics of the individual and the selection of the ”right” treatment, we believe that genomics combined with info-gap decision theory can get us much closer to this ideal of personalized medicine. Info-gap decision theory has the potential to allow physicians and patients to consider every factor that is important to the patient, including his or her personal preferences, as well as to relate the patient much more specifically to population studies. It is this combination of info-gap decision theory and pharmacogenomics, we believe, that holds the most promise for patients and physicians to exercise their fullest discretion in selecting the most appropriate treatment course.