Needles, pills and patches may become tools of the past for some medications, including those used for oral pain medications, nail fungus and possibly diabetes.

What would you do if there was a way to determine - with almost near certainty - what you might die from? Would you want to know? Would you want your doctor to know? Would you want your kids to know?

Seeded with a $2.5 million grant from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and matching funds from UNLV, the institute will decode people’s genomes to predict individual susceptibility to disease, study treatment options and fine-tune drug dosages to minimize adverse effects, Executive Director Martin Schiller said.

Looking at a graph of human life expectancy over the past four millennia, you get how far medicine has come from diagnosing witchcraft and prescribing bloodletting. But it’s still so inexact that for every year we live, we gain about two months of life. That’s how fast research is improving health care, says Martin Schiller, adding: “It’s maybe the best buy in history for return on investment.”