The hope of personalized medicine is a pretty big one : Tailoring handling to a patient ’s genes , their environment or their life style , the intellection goes , will result in treatments that are much more likely to act . The same disease can manifest otherwise in different people , so why treat patients with a one - size - fits - all - approach ?
But anew paperfrom the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that , if personalised medicine really contract off , it could actually wrap up hurt the pace of biomedical innovation .
Here ’s why : Say there ’s a individualised lung cancer drug target at the specific genetical variation involve in causing the malignant neoplastic disease . Not every lung Crab patient will have that same mutation . Instead , there are likely to be many unlike biomarkers associated with the same cancer . That means that if a drug works , instead of get a blockbuster drug for a coarse disease on its hand , the companionship that acquire the drug will have a drug tailored to a much smaller market of affected role . And that , the paper suggests , could “ reduce some of the bonus for innovation . ”
That ’s not the only grocery impact the NBER look made-to-order therapy will have . The more effective the therapy , the newspaper publisher advise , the bigger the price tag might be . At the same clip , it could also foreshorten the monetary value of drug by “ allowing more sophisticated pricing systems and potentially decreasing the cost of drug development through shorter and more focused trials . ” It could drastically alter what kinds of drugs are really profitable to bring to grocery . It might mean that drugs target the same disease but different biomarkers could change significantly in cost . The narrow-minded scope of personalize drug could also conjure the problem of monopolies .
In tax the future impact of individualised medicine ( also call preciseness practice of medicine ) on healthcare outlay , the NBER combed through a database of more than 130,000 spheric clinical run over the past two decades and looked at trials targeting specific biomarkers .
The US is betting big on individualized medicinal drug with the Obama - eraPrecision Medicine Initiative , a long - term research endeavor to sympathise how a someone ’s genetics , environment , and lifestyle can influence the expression and treatment of disease . Last yr ’s 21st Century Cures Act promote the goals of the initiative by encourage the FDA to develop fresh regulatory approaches for the supervising of the genomic technologies that will play a major role in germinate personalized therapies . The NBER report is a good admonisher , though , that when big change is on the horizon , it ’s authoritative to consider all of the possible consequences .
GeneticsHealthScience
Daily Newsletter
Get the best tech , skill , and refinement news in your inbox daily .
News from the future , delivered to your present tense .
You May Also Like
