Another Drug to Cross Off the Personalized Med List

A feature article in the August issue of Scientific American throws into question the concept of race-based drugs — how race is, or is not, meaningfully taken into account as a way to label genetic variation among individuals in clinical trials. Author Jonathan Kahn details the history of the making of BiDil, a drug intended to treat congestive heart failure only in African-Americans, into the first "ethnic drug." Kahn writes that the drug was FDA-approved under faulty evidence, and warns that most scientists don't see race as a useful way to predict drug response or genetic variation when it comes to creating more drugs like BiDil.