A cornerstone of precision medicine, pharmacogenomic testing allows drug treatment for a disease to be tailored to a person’s genetic makeup. Despite a large amount of research having been carried out in this area from the 1990s onward, only a few of the findings have reached the clinic in the form of tests.

High costs, unreliable data, and a lack of physician education have been cited as reasons for this slow adoption, but recent developments like improvements in data and guidelines, reductions in test costs, and government support for pharmacogenomics suggest that the this technology will be increasingly adopted in the U.S. and elsewhere in the near future.

Drug-metabolizing enzymes evolved to help humans and other animals metabolize poisonous substances consumed by accident (e.g., tox

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