As the problem of orphan drugs and diseases illustrates, pharmaceutical companies have no obligation to develop drugs in an equitable

manner, eg, with racial or ethnic nonbias. If a racial or ethnic group is very small, for example, the costbenefit ratio for developing drugs to treat that group may not be economically rewarding. This is a further form of possible discrimination that governments may need to deal with in their health care and health research policies in order to ensure the protection of genetic or ethnic minorities. Conclusion Personalized medicine Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in psychiatry, eg, in the form of tailored antidepressant or antipsychotic treatment, has already made important progress, notably in terms of adjusted therapeutic doses, and predictable drug responses or drug-induced side effects. Although promising, these opportunities also give rise to numerous scientific, ethical, legal, and social challenges. An adequate assessment of personalized medicine in psychiatry Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical must within all these perspectives be based both on selleck compound analyses of the science behind pharmacogenomics research to get a realistic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical view of what can actually be achieved, and

on analyses of the relevant sociopolitical structures surrounding this research. Justified hopes must not be inflated to become hypes of exaggerated promises that would serve no legitimate purpose. Signs of hype, for instance in the form of pressures for rash implementation, should be forestalled and a realistic view presented. Realistic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical costbenefit analyses are needed to produce reasonable health care budgets; pharmacogenetic tests must be developed together with guidelines for their use, so that the new techniques can be responsibly implemented in clinical practice; public policies on orphan diseases and drugs may need to be extended Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to avoid creating a new group of “genetic orphans”; whilst legal regulations are needed to ensure that the genetic information obtained is safely protected

from misuse, and that genetic or ethnic minorities are protected from discrimination. The ethical considerations that have here been considered in terms of adequacy, cost, and therapeutic equity raise no objections to the development Entinostat of personalized medicine per se in this domain. Rather, they point to the necessity of developing a social infrastructure with adequate guidelines to ensure the responsible implementation of these promising new techniques. Acknowledgments I thank Marc Thomson, MD, FBCPM, for his valuable contributions and many helpful comments to this article.
A brain imaging method could be defined as any experimental technique that allows human (or animal) brain structure or function to be studied, preferably in vivo in the current context.