A Glimpse Into Personalized Medicine of the Future - washingtonpost.com

[Guest guest]

In announcing his plan, land Gov. O'Malley (D) invoked the potential power of personalized medicine. C. von Eschenbach, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has repeatedly pushed the agency to encourage personalized diagnosis and treatment. The X-Prize Foundation, an educational nonprofit, is offering a $10 million prize to whoever can develop technology that cuts the cost and time of sequencing a genome.

At AdvaMed 2008, I also caught up with Glen T. Giovannetti, head of Ernst & Young's global biotechnology practice, which publishes an annual industry report. He offered his analysis of how this new frontier might be achieved.

The science behind personalized medicine is advancing rapidly, he said. Cancer patients are already using targeted drugs, such as Herceptin. Companies such as Vanda Pharmaceuticals of Rockville are applying genetics to tailor drug discovery, clinical trials and marketing compounds to the right patients.

Soon personalized medicine will reinvent business models, Ernst & Young predicts. Today drug companies profit by selling large volumes of low-priced products. In the future, high-priced personalized medicine will be sold in low volumes.

This also means altering benchmarks evaluating cost benefits. Today society is being asked whether we are willing to pay $50,000 to extend a cancer patient's life by three months -- a heart-wrenching decision for doctors and loved ones, said Giovannetti. Personalized medicine will be expensive, but society will also need to assess its total impact. For example, targeted drugs could lower costs in other parts of the health-care system by eliminating ineffective therapies.

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