Beyond Borders: Global biotechnology report 2010

Perspectives on personalized medicine
What one thing would you change to accelerate
the adoption of personalized medicine?
No one challenges the essential premise of personalized medicine —
to deliver better therapies to patients. Made possible by the dramatic
and continuing advances of 21st-century science and technology,
personalized medicine can increase efficacy, decrease risk, open
opportunities to prevent disease before it occurs, and lower systemic
cost. Nevertheless, despite this great promise, as the chart below
illustrates, we are nowhere near redefining the way medicine is
practiced, even where the products that would allow us to do so are
available. Indeed, there are many barriers and obstacles that deter
investment in and slow the clinical adoption of personalized medicine.
In partnership with Ernst & Young, we asked seven leaders from
across the health care spectrum — from a venture capitalist to a
patient advocate — to suggest one change they would make to
State of personalized medicine adoption
Insurance coverage
and reimbursement
Genetic privacy and
legal protections
Technology and tools
Recognition of value
Enactment of policy
or legislation
Pilots and
precedent
Full implementation
and standardization
96 Beyond borders Global biotechnology report 2010
Edward Abrahams
Personalized Medicine Coalition
President
accelerate the development and clinical adoption of personalized
medicine.
Taken together, their comments are revealing. They point toward a
new definition for health care reform, focusing on aligning incentives
in research, insurance coverage and reimbursement, and on
regulation as the agents of change. If, as proponents of personalized
medicine argue, the government’s signals to both public and private
sectors were coordinated and targeted toward the goal of achieving
higher-quality, more-efficient medicine at lower systemic costs, then
patients and society could both be winners.
As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has
written, personalized medicine “presents the opportunity of
transformational change.”
Regulation
Medical education
Health care information
technology
Source: “The Case for Personalized Medicine,” Personalized Medicine Coalition, May 2009.
The implementation of personalized medicine requires a confluence of several sectors (represented by wedges).
The concentric circles represent stages of implementation for each sector, the final stage being full implementation and standardization.