As a genre, personalized medicine has yet to deliver many individualized treatments. But progress has been more tangible on the diagnostics side.Some of that progress has come from Tethys Bioscience, a startup in Emeryville, CA, that is working on tests for some of the country's most prevalent diseases. Their first diagnostic, a blood test called PreDx, determines a person's risk of developing diabetes over a five-year period. The test is already changing the way some physicians diagnose and treat their patients.
People with prediabetes don't regulate blood sugar the way they should; of the 57 million or so people in the U.S. with this syndrome, only about 10 to 15 percent develop the full-blown disease. With proper diet and exercise, the trajectory toward diabetes can be slowed or even reversed. But the current standard for identifying diabetes risk, the fasting blood-glucose test, can't determine which 10 to 15 percent are most likely to get the disease. As a result, doctors can't easily figure out which patients to concentrate on.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Technology Review: Diabetes Risk, on a Scale of 1 to 10
Author: Lauren Gravitz
