Mayo Clinic Takes 'Holistic' Approach to Personalized Medicine

"We are bringing everybody together under an individualized medicine working group," he says. That would include medical genetics professionals, counselors, oncologists, ethics specialists, sequencing specialists and pathologists. The group meets once a week "and systematically goes through all the issues," Farrugia says. 

Among those issues: the impacts of the data: "Do you want to tell someone about the risk of a gene that may impact a relative? We're going to be upfront and deal with it."

So Farrugia tells me, Mayo is weighing its options. "We not only see the market's promise, but we also see the realities."

"We're trying to have a holistic approach to individualized medicine," he says. "It's very much what physicians had to deal with 30 years ago, asking the same personal questions, but they didn't have the data to back it up. More information from the whole genome sequencing can back up the intuition that the physician originally had."