How Doctors Could One Day Use Your DNA To Cure You

It worked. Dishman is finally cancer-free after more than 20 years — and, following a successful kidney transplant, he now heads the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program at the National Institutes of Health. There, he’s in charge of recruiting 1 million Americans to share their DNA and medical histories for a massive study. As research like this pinpoints links between genetic variation and disease, doctors could someday look up a patient’s DNA and use it to prescribe custom treatments for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more.

Dishman’s case is still an anomaly.

“I was ­triple lucky,” he says: lucky to have his DNA sequenced, lucky his doctors waded into the data, and lucky — most of all — that the information led to a cure. But Dishman hopes his million volunteers will help him discover more markers that lead to successful tailored treatments. And that would make the survival equation a little less luck and a lot more science.

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