MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
A trip to the drugstore was about to change forever.
“Let’s see, aspirin … Q-tips … throat lozenges… wonder if I’ll be getting prostate cancer any time soon … ?”
But hold on a second, the FDA is now saying you might have to wait a while for that over-the-counter, self-administered genetic testing kit: the Pathway Genomics Insight Saliva Collection Kit.
It was supposed to show up Friday on Walgreens shelves nationwide, right there with the Fusion blades and the Charmin rolls. But under pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the giant drugstore chain blinked, announcing that no DNA-test kits will be sold “until we have further clarity.”
And what exactly needed clarification?
Walgreens didn’t say. But the basic issue appears to be how much authority the feds have in regulating these genetic-testing kits.
Clearly, science keeps marching. And clearly people are curious about the dreadful diseases they may or may not get. Up till now that’s meant spending thousands of dollars for a traditional doctor’s-office and hospital-lab DNA test.
Pathway Genomics had a different idea. The kit costs $20. You spit into the test tube and mail it back to the lab with $79 to $249, depending on how much testing you want. The tests assess your risk of getting 70 different conditions, including bad ones such as heart disease, hypertension and lung cancer.
The company also offers “carrier testing” for women looking to get pregnant. It supposedly screens for disorders such as cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease.
But do you really want to know? And are you smart enough to properly interpret the test results and know how to respond once you get them? When it comes to your health, can you handle the truth?
That’s the personal part of the over-the-counter genetics equation: Grab theQ-tips at the drugstore — or something more?
Since the beginning of time, doctors and hospitals have had a monopoly on this kind of information. But that won’t last much longer, whatever Walgreens and the FDA ultimately decide.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican.
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