Medicine increasingly is being refocused to deliver tailor-made results for patients in much the same way that clothes, diets and even golf clubs can be customized to meet the needs of one person.

Personalized medicine, which experts say represents the future of health care, begins by mapping a patient's genome, or hereditary information.

With that information, doctors can formulate drugs or doses of drugs made specifically for the patient, ensuring both the drug and dosage are safe for that patient.

More than safety, it also ensures that the drug will work -- and that's important because many drugs on the market today just don't work for everyone.

"Something like 90 percent of the drugs on the market today are effective in about 40 percent of the population," said Clayton W. Naeve, senior vice president and chief information officer for Memphis-based St. Jude Children's Research Hospital said.

"Think about that for a second. Every time you go to Walgreens to get a prescription filled, you might have a 50-50 chance of that working for you."

Naeve recently participated in a three-member panel discussion on personalized medicine hosted by the Memphis Bioworks Foundation at the University Club. Other participants were Bob Bean, CEO of Harmonyx Diagnostics Inc., and Jack Cox, vice president of business development for Accredo Health Group Inc.

Personalized medicine would not be possible at all today without the 13-year, $3.8 billion Human Genome Project, which mapped the first human genome and concluded in 2003. Naeve said mapping a genome today costs about $8,000 and takes about a week.

He should know. St. Jude and Washington University in St. Louis are two years into their $65 million Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, which includes reading the genomes of more than 600 St. Jude cancer patients.

The effort recently yielded two studies published in the journal Nature that identified promising new approaches for treating eye tumors and a particularly aggressive form of leukemia.

While decoding genomes has gotten quicker and faster, getting doctors to adopt gene-based medicine has been a slow go, said Accredo's Cox.

However, drug companies and manufacturers are running with the ball, he said. Of the 611 drugs Accredo is watching (ones that may come to market in the next five to eight years), 67 percent of them are expected to come with a genetic test, Cox said.

"We feel like (adoption of personalized medicine) is going in the right direction, but we're still at the beginning," Cox said.

Only 13 personalized medicine products were commercially available in 2006, according to a study from the the North Carolina-based Personalized Medicine Coalition. There were 72 products available to patients when the study was published in November. While the five-fold increase is promising, the group said, there's a long road still ahead.

"The case for personalized medicine is not closed," said Brian Munroe, chairman of the group's public policy committee. "(The study) illustrates the regulatory, reimbursement and educational challenges that still need to be overcome to complete the transition from one-size-fits-all medicine to personalized medicine."

Also, personalized medicine will likely be more expensive for consumers. They'll likely be charged by their doctors to simply run the tests. But they may also pay more for the drugs themselves as the drug companies pay more for the extra research needed to get them to market.

"It's a paradigm shift in how they conduct their research and how they fund their business and how they make their profits," Naeve said. "It's a huge, huge change for them."

Bean's Cordova-based company, Harmonyx, now runs genetic tests for physicians prescribing blood clot preventers warfarin and Plavix. The tests tell physicians if the drugs are right for the patient, and if so, then how much to give them.

"If you knew the results before you dose a patient with warfarin and if you know what dose they need, you will reduce the rehospitalization rate on that patient by 30 percent," Bean said. "It's incredibly powerful information."

Insurance companies are also beginning to get on board with personalized medicine, Bean said. Twelve months ago, he said, no insurance companies were paying for genetic testing of Plavix. Now, 28 insurance companies are paying for the service.

-- Toby Sells: (901) 529-2742