  4/15/13Follow @xconomy  (Page 2 of 2)  typically only work for
about 25 percent of the patients who get them. Asthma drugs only
work for about 60 percent. Rheumatoid arthritis meds work maybe
half the time. A lot of money gets wasted on treatments that
don’t work for an individual patient. As any student can tell
you, biology is incredibly complicated. We don’t know what
causes lots of diseases, rheumatoid arthritis included. We’ve
certainly never had the ability to predict, with a high degree
of mathematical confidence, which drug is most likely to work
for a given patient.  That’s starting to change, partly because
of what GNS is doing. GNS has gone around and struck licensing
deals to stitch together a database with health data from 100
million American lives. It’s chock full of info from electronic
medical records, registries, and claims datasets. These datasets
contain patient characteristic information on things like age,
gender, ethnicity, diagnosis, smoking or non-smoking-status.
There’s also inform