What is the role of the clinical laboratory in personalized health care in the next five years?
A. The concept of personalized health care, or care provided to an individual based on the knowledge of that individual’s family and medical history, disease, and diagnostic testing, has been evolving for years. Newborn screening for the metabolic disorder phenylketonuria began in the 1960s. What’s more personal than a karyotype of one’s chromosomes? G-banded chromosome analysis has been offered since the early 1970s. One of the first forays into molecular medicine in the 1980s was the detection of an alteration of a restriction enzyme site caused by a point mutation in the hemoglobin beta chain gene and a phenotype of sickle cell anemia.1 However, only recently, with the publication in 2007 of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services document, “Personalized Health Care: Opportunities, Pathways, Resources,”2 endorsed by then HHS secretary Michael Leavitt, did the concept take form and evolve to the level of federal directives to encourage the translation of scientific knowledge
