I should have more to say about science/technology as I am going to school for that very reason. My genetics prof brought up a very interesting topic during class the other day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalized_medicine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacogenomics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacogenetics
Basically once a receptor or pathway is found that responds to a certain drug such as HIV drugs, cancer drugs, antidepressants etc. The genes involved can be cloned into insect cells (they are easiest to work with in this case) and expressed. Then you treat the cells with different concentrations and different types of drugs and see what works best. (I think its measured by some sort of light expression) ie. which drug at a certain concentration will be the most effective to treat someone. The example my prof used was depression, many people go through a bunch of different drugs before they find the right one.
I haven't looked too much into the topic, but it seems interesting. With the increasing ease of sequencing genomes and the mass of data acquired from bioinformatics the only things I could see stopping this from being a very profitable industry are moral or otherwise concerns, made mostly by people who don't understand the process. (when most people think cloning they think making new humans or something, you just stick a gene into a vector, or in the case of PCR - used in paternity tests and criminology - you make copies of the DNA present)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalized_medicine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacogenomics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacogenetics
Basically once a receptor or pathway is found that responds to a certain drug such as HIV drugs, cancer drugs, antidepressants etc. The genes involved can be cloned into insect cells (they are easiest to work with in this case) and expressed. Then you treat the cells with different concentrations and different types of drugs and see what works best. (I think its measured by some sort of light expression) ie. which drug at a certain concentration will be the most effective to treat someone. The example my prof used was depression, many people go through a bunch of different drugs before they find the right one.
I haven't looked too much into the topic, but it seems interesting. With the increasing ease of sequencing genomes and the mass of data acquired from bioinformatics the only things I could see stopping this from being a very profitable industry are moral or otherwise concerns, made mostly by people who don't understand the process. (when most people think cloning they think making new humans or something, you just stick a gene into a vector, or in the case of PCR - used in paternity tests and criminology - you make copies of the DNA present)