According to two researchers, the answer is no. As they write at Stat:
As we wrote recently in Science, three key barriers are impeding the drive toward truly transformational precision medicine: researchers often don’t rigorously test the biological theories that supposedly explain why a targeted treatment should work; they haven’t fully determined the accuracy of the diagnostic tests used to figure out if a patient is a good candidate for the therapy; and there’s little coordination between investigators, which has led to inefficient research.
Can you give me an example of the problem?
An evaluation of 33 studies of ERCC1 and lung cancer chemotherapy showed so much heterogeneity in the diagnostic methods and scoring rules that the results are essentially incomparable. So after more than a decade of research, we still don’t know if measuring ERCC1 makes a difference. Nevertheless, numerous ERCC1 test kits are commercially available, and are being used to help “guide” lung cancer chemotherapy.
Precision medicine is still a laudable goal. Finding the best treatment on average is less useful than finding the best treatment match for each patient. However, rigorous science needs to back up any claims that treatments are more or less effective for specific biomarkers or lab values.
Precision medicine is still the future…the future may just be a few more years away than we had previously hoped.