President Bush signed the Genetic Information Discrimination Act on May 21, 2008, to protect Americans against discrimination based on genetic information. This would include discrimination at employment as well as when applying for insurance. More and more of the clinical studies at Charlottesville Medical Research include an option of providing a blood sample for "pharmacogenetics". Pharmacogenetics is one of the newest sub-specialties of genetics which deals with the relationship between inherited genes and the ability of the body to metabolize drugs. Medicine today relies on the use of therapeutic drugs to treat disease, but one longstanding problem has been the documented variation in patient response to drug therapy.

The pharmaceutical industry is looking for ways to determine if drugs work better (or even adversely) in persons with a particular gene. This could ultimately lead to "personalized medicine". For instance, currently multiple drugs are tried on an individual patient to control Hypertension, until the right combination is reached. This is very costly to individuals and insurance companies alike, but could be bypassed if genetic tests pinpointed the right medicine.