In medicine, genetic sequencing is not only important for traditional uses, such as paternity tests, but also for facilitating ease in diagnosis and treatment. Personalized medicine has been heralded as the future of healthcare, as whole genome sequencing have provided the possibility personalizing treatment to individual expression and experience of disease. As pharmacology and drug development are based on population studies, current treatments are normalized to whole populations statistics, which might reduce treatment efficacy for individuals, as everyone's response to a disease and to drug therapy is uniquely bound to their genetic predispositions. Already, genetic sequencing has expedited prognostic counseling in monogenic diseases that requires rapid, differential diagnosis in neonatal care. However, the often blurred distinction between medical usage and research usage can complicate how privacy between these two realms are handled, as they often require different levels of consent and leverage different policy.
