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June 19, 2008
BIO Break
by Peter Pitts
There’s so much going on at the BIO convention. It’s a healthcare policy feast.
One panel I attended was on the future of personalized medicine via diagnostics. A few of the points made were:
* At present, “trial and error medicine” is the standard of care. Not good for providers, patients, nor payers. That’s true.
* What we today call “personalized medicine” will be referred to in the near future as “medicine.” That’s hopeful.
* Diagnostics will deliver personalized care via drug selection, dosing, efficacy, disease status, recurrence risk, and predisposition. That’s exciting.
* Diagnostics lead the league in the price/value proposition – and that’s what will initially drive uptake. That’s reality.
* To that point, there was also discussion of a diagnostics acceptance continuum beginning with “fear” and then moving to “value” and finally “acceptance.”
* And the constituencies moving along that path include pharmaceutical companies, physicians, patients, payers – and regulators.
* Specifically, to more expeditiously sashay down the Critical Path, the diagnostics industry needs industry-wide guidelines for clinical research.
Take-away is that "personalized" medicine is 21st century medicine. And that's a "win" for physicians, payers ... and even patients. As BIO Chairman (and Vertex CEO) Dr. Joshua Boger commented at the opening day's keynote, we must all be "a confederation of optimists."
Posted by peterpitts at June 19, 2008 11:01 AM
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