Personalized medicine

Personalized medicine: Time for one-person trials

Precision medicine requires a different type of clinical trial that focuses on individual, not average, responses to therapy, says Nicholas J. Schork.

Illustration by Greg Clarke

Every day, millions of people are taking medications that will not help them. The top ten highest-grossing drugs in the United States help between 1 in 25 and 1 in 4 of the people who take them (see 'Imprecision medicine'). For some drugs, such as statins — routinely used to lower cholesterol — as few as 1 in 50 may benefit¹. There are even drugs that are harmful to certain ethnic groups because of the bias towards white Western participants in classical clinical trials².

Learn more: Nature