Perhaps the greatest moment for pharmacogenomics was the New Yorker cartoon last year showing a woman in front of a drug counter who hands her pharmacist a slip of paper confidently saying, “Here is my sequence.”

In the cartoon, the pharmacist is speechless, but today he may have an answer, something like: “Very good, madam. Do you also have your proteomic and metabolomic workups, your lifestyle profile and history of environmental factors?”

It’s not funny, but it describes the challenges facing personalized medicine on the pharmaceutical side of healthcare.

— John Brosky, European Editor