Health Insurers Struggle to Manage Number, Cost of Genetic Tests.

said to have an allele labeled as *2, shown on the test report as CYP2C19*2. No one in the doctor’s office— including the doctor himself—knew the significance of the asterisk. “The doctor called me and said, ‘I got this interesting value. It was CYP2C19 squared,’” Laposata says. “And I said, ‘What do you mean, squared?’ The doctor thought it was a superscript and *2 meant it was squared. I said, “My God, when you have a genetic test, that’s an allele.” And when I said that, I got this—a question I get quite often—‘What’s an allele?’”