healthcare reform

The amount of activity last year on the regulatory, reimbursement, legislative, educational, and intellectual property fronts is a sign that the wheels are slowly shifting toward creating a framework that will someday support and deliver genomically guided medicine, even though plenty of barriers and challenges need to be overcome on the path to that goal.

The healthcare reform bill includes a section on comparative effectiveness research that creates the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Seen as a victory for personalized medicine, the institute will study the utility of medical products in "various subpopulations," including groups differentiated by genetic and molecular subtypes.