Abstract Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM) has long emphasized personalized care through constitution- and pattern-based diagnostics, conceptually aligning with the goals of modern precision medicine. Recent advances in “omics” technologies are providing new tools to validate and refine these traditional frameworks. Heritability analyses and genome-wide association studies suggest that Sasang constitutional types have moderate heritability (approximately 40–55%) and are associated with specific genetic loci related to metabolic and neuroendocrine functions. Pharmacogenomic research is also identifying patient-specific predictors of treatment outcomes in TKM, including variants such as COMT Val158Met and OPRM1 A118G that influence acupuncture analgesic response, and HLA-B *35:01 associated with herb-induced liver injury risk. Newly established Korean integrative cohorts that pair standardized TKM diagnostics with whole-genome and metabolome data are feeding machine-learning models capable of objectively classifying constitutions and forecasting therapeutic outcomes. Despite these advances, the field faces sizable hurdles—diagnostic standardization, cohort expansion across diverse ethnicities, sophisticated bioinformatic integration, clinician genomics training, and clear ethical and regulatory guidance must all be addressed before genomics can be routinely deployed in TKM clinics. Nevertheless, early results already demonstrate gains in diagnostic precision, treatment efficacy, and safety, underscoring that a data-driven, integrative future for TKM is both feasible and worth pursuing. Graphic Abstract
Yoon et al. (Wed,) studied this question.