DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

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BOSTON GLOBE

Should medicine be colorblind?
Debate erupts over a drug that works better in African-Americans
By Carolyn Johnson, Globe Correspondent / August 24, 2004

A heart failure drug shown effective in African-Americans stands to become the first ethnically targeted drug, if a Lexington biotechnology firm is successful in its bid for federal approval.

It would be the first drug targeted at patients on the basis of ancestry -- a dangerous precedent, some ethicists and activists say, because a new marriage of race and genetics could distract from the real causes of disease.

The tricky part of this emerging debate is that the drug, BiDil, seems to work, extending the lives of African-Americans who sustain heart failure. The latest trial of BiDil was halted last month by an outside panel that decided the drug was so effective it was unconscionable to let some patients continue to get a placebo instead of BiDil. An earlier trial found the drug was of relatively little benefit to white patients.

So, if the government doesn't approve BiDil, it would deny African-Americans treatment for a disease that strikes them earlier than whites, often with a deadly outcome; if it does approve it, some will accuse the government of racism and bad science.

''I think if people get one little inkling that there's a biological basis to race, we could potentially lose ground into understanding racial difference in disease," said JudyAnn Bigby, director of the Office for Women, Family and Community Programs at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2004/08/24/should_medicine_be_colorblind/

What seems of interest here is that DNAP might have or be able to generate personalized medicine diagnostic algorithms that would resolve any such racial issue by being, in fact, even more accurate and more precisely based on genetic factors. For instance, while DeBil generally works better on African-Americans than on whites, it seems very likely that there are also some whites that it also works very well for and some African-Americans that it does not work so well for, etc., thus a DNAP type more precise, genetically based, personalized medicine approach would dismiss any such racial issues as well as be more effective.