The microeconomics of personalized medicine. Diagnostics is the key to personalized medicine, a tailored approach to treatment based on the molecular analysis of genes, proteins, and metabolites.
Yet although this approach has generated much excitement, few personalized-medicine tests have achieved high levels of clinical adoption. To understand better the challenges to the development and acceptance of personalized medicine—and how to overcome them—we interviewed more than 60 leading experts in this and related fields and conducted microeconomic analyses of various stakeholder issues.
We focus here on the US market, but the challenges are also relevant elsewhere. Our proposals for overcoming them could significantly accelerate the adoption of personalized medicine. Stakeholder incentives and challenges Payers Investors and analysts have suggested that personalized medicine can dramatically reduce health care costs and help payers market products to the most attractive customers.
Exhibit 1 Enlarge Exhibit 2 Providers Exhibit 3 Exhibit 4. Personalized Medicine: Health Economic Aspects. Alexander Roediger is director, European Union affairs at MSD (Europe).
This article first appeared as chapter 4 of a white paper published by the EuropaBio Personalised Medicine Taskforce entitled "Personalised Medicine: Status Quo and Challenges". EuropaBio represents 56 corporate members and 14 associate members and BIO regions, and 19 national biotechnology associations who in turn represent some 1800 small and medium sized biotech companies in Europe. Members of EuropaBio are involved in research, development, testing, manufacturing and commercialisation of biotechnology products and processes. Our corporate members have a wide range of activities: human and animal health care, diagnostics, bio-informatics, chemicals, crop protection, agriculture, food and environmental products and services.
References:1 Quintiles (2011), The New Health Report. 2011. PM_by_the_Numbers.pdf. Of Personalized Medicine. Personalized medicine — the ability to tailor therapies to patients’ individual genetic characteristics — has long been the holy grail of the life sciences industry.
The effort has produced a string of recent successes, including a host of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles, the European approval of the world’s first gene therapy treatment, and a much-heralded leukemia treatment pioneered at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that uses tweaked versions of patients’ own cells to eliminate their cancer. While these advances are certainly exciting for patients, they raise a host of ethical, legal and financial challenges that people working in the field will need to address before personalized medicine can become a thriving business. The challenges are so great, contends Wharton health care management professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel, that claims of a renaissance in medicine brought on by individualized approaches often seem hyperbolic. Who Owns Genetic Data? The Creative Destruction of Medicine Will Happen. In his new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, Eric Topol argues that medicine is set to undergo its biggest shakeup in history, pushed by demanding consumers and the availability of game-changing technology.
Topol — a cardiologist, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and co-founder of the West Wireless Health Institute in La Jolla, Calif. — was recently interviewed for Knowledge@Wharton by C. William Hanson, III, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care, and director, surgical intensive care, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Hanson’s latest book is titled, Smart Medicine: How the Changing Role of Doctors Will Revolutionize Health Care, published in 2011. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation. William Hanson: I thought it might be worthwhile to quickly give you a sense of who I am and where I’m coming from [in this interview]. I love the title of your book.