Health Care Trends With a Social Media Twist
Turning The Corner in Personalised Medicine
Since the dawn of Molecular Biology in the 1930s an overwhelming body of research has helped mankind to develop an understanding of how life works at its most basic level. With this molecular knowledge came rational drug design and the ability to no longer have to accept the hand that nature dealt us at birth. Diseases which were once a death sentence are today treatable.
The pace of research in the last two decades was relentless and soon it became apparent that a “one size fits all” approach to medicine was no longer appropriate. Subtle genetic differences between individuals meant that drugs could work wonderfully in one patient and show no effect whatsoever in another. The era of personalised medicine was upon us.
Sadly, the emergence of this knowledge has not, for the most part, been translated into tailored personalised medicine for the masses. And why? The underlying stumbling blocks are many and varied. On a purely technical level, systems to determine a patient’s entire genetic profile still remain too expensive for widespread use. The cost of a whole genome sequence today still costs approximately $5,000 with equipment costs coming in at $600,000.
Genetic tests for single genes (as opposed to analysing your whole genome) are in contrast very cheap and the progression of many diseases are underpinned by a single gene defect. So why then, if these tests are cheap and useful, are they not being more widely adopted? Most pharmaceutical company’s business model is based around the quest for blockbuster drugs. The emergence of genetic tests that would endanger that model is a huge threat to the industry and only a handful of label changes for blockbusters have been implemented to date.
What does the future hold? Change will likely be slow in the personalised medicine space. However the current blanket approach to disease management, particularly for cancer, means that many patients, because of their genetic makeup, will not respond to specific drugs. Given our haemorrhaging healthcare systems on both side of the Atlantic, the benefits of personalised medicine over longer time horizons on a purely financial basis will lead to wider adoption and hence better patient treatment.
The pace of research in the last two decades was relentless and soon it became apparent that a “one size fits all” approach to medicine was no longer appropriate. Subtle genetic differences between individuals meant that drugs could work wonderfully in one patient and show no effect whatsoever in another. The era of personalised medicine was upon us.
Sadly, the emergence of this knowledge has not, for the most part, been translated into tailored personalised medicine for the masses. And why? The underlying stumbling blocks are many and varied. On a purely technical level, systems to determine a patient’s entire genetic profile still remain too expensive for widespread use. The cost of a whole genome sequence today still costs approximately $5,000 with equipment costs coming in at $600,000.
Genetic tests for single genes (as opposed to analysing your whole genome) are in contrast very cheap and the progression of many diseases are underpinned by a single gene defect. So why then, if these tests are cheap and useful, are they not being more widely adopted? Most pharmaceutical company’s business model is based around the quest for blockbuster drugs. The emergence of genetic tests that would endanger that model is a huge threat to the industry and only a handful of label changes for blockbusters have been implemented to date.
What does the future hold? Change will likely be slow in the personalised medicine space. However the current blanket approach to disease management, particularly for cancer, means that many patients, because of their genetic makeup, will not respond to specific drugs. Given our haemorrhaging healthcare systems on both side of the Atlantic, the benefits of personalised medicine over longer time horizons on a purely financial basis will lead to wider adoption and hence better patient treatment.
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© 2012 Created by Palmer Reuther.
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