Blunt instrument

Figuring out which patients should or should not take COX-2 inhibitors would seem like the perfect opportunity for the emerging field of pharmacogenomics to show its stuff. The ideal would be a test that enabled doctors to identify those patients at elevated risk of a cardiovascular event if they took a COX-2 inhibitor, as well as patients at elevated risk of a gastrointestinal bleeding event if they took a conventional NSAID in the absence of the COX-2 alternative.

Such tools would give policymakers and regulators a more measured alternative to the draconian solution employed by Merck & Co. Inc. when it pulled Vioxx rofecoxib off the market at the end of September (see BioCentury, Oct. 4, 2004)...