Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 2...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 27 to 34.

        In UVA’s labyrinthine labs, researchers probe how the gut’s microbial makeup modulates cancer trajectories. By perturbing mice with antibiotics to induce dysbiosis, they observe shifts in immune signaling and metastatic behavior. The team treats the microbiome as a barometer of environment, diet, and stressors, arguing that clinical insight must account for these contextual textures. Although many variables complicate causality, the aim is pragmatic: translate basic findings into preventive strategies and gentler therapeutics that attenuate metastasis while respecting patient-specific physiology.

        Personalized medicine marries genetic, environmental, and lifestyle data to steer prevention and care. In oncology, targeted therapies and immunotherapy have sharpened efficacy and spared patients blunt, exhausting regimens. Over recent decades, clinicians have moved away from a monolithic template toward treatments calibrated to a patient’s molecular profile. Teams now stratify tumors by driver mutations to forecast prognosis and select interventions with greater precision, helping explain steep mortality declines in certain cancers such as melanoma, and advancing beyond the “one-size-fits-all” orthodoxy in clinical decision-making.

        Pharmacogenomics extends personalization beyond cancer by aligning drug choice and dose with inherited variation in metabolism, transport, and immune response. A simple swab can reveal markers indicating toxicity risks or likely nonresponse, guiding safer dosing or alternatives. Crucially, pharmacogenomic testing – it primarily concerns genes mediating drug handling rather than predicting untreatable diseases – now has guideline support for 26 gene–drug pairs. While broadly nascent outside academic centers, the approach reduces adverse events when small dosing errors would otherwise prove perilous.

        The research frontier is lively but uneven. The FDA has authorized a genetic test (Dec 2023) to flag elevated risk of opioid use disorder after surgery, and large initiatives – such as Mount Sinai’s plan to sequence one million diverse patients – promise richer datasets. Yet gaps persist: most genomic studies over-sample people of European ancestry, blunting generalizability, and health systems struggle with equitable delivery of high-end technologies at scale. Progress thus hinges on diversity, infrastructure, and pragmatic pathways to access.

(Adapted from AAMC, “Making medicine personal: Moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to health care,” Feb 22, 2024)

Question 27. The word nascent in paragraph 3 is OPPOSITE in meaning to ______.

A. budding                B. incipient                        C. mature                        D. embryonic