"President Barack Obama's plan to put the United States at the forefront of individually tailored medical treatment should give a much-needed boost to research in the field but experts say it won't work without reforms to healthcare, including drug testing and insurance.
"The field has a tremendous need to crunch data and turn it into useful information," said Lynn Etheredge, director of the Rapid Learning Project, which aims to harness electronic health records and other data to improve medical care.
One barrier to change is that government and private health insurance does not routinely cover genetic testing.
The federal Medicare program, for instance, declined in 2009 to cover a routine genetic test to predict how a patient's cancer would respond to anti-clotting drug Warfarin.
But overall healthcare costs could be reduced by genetics because "insurers could stop paying for drugs that don't help people," said UCSF's Yamamoto."
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