6:13 pm by Meghana Keshavan
Personalized medicine will be expensive in these early days of pioneering and planning. But individual genomic testing is not going to be exorbitant forever – and the ROI is gonna be big, both in patient outcomes and dollars saved, said a panel of speakers at MedCity’s CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia.
“Because pharmacogenomics is rooted in the pathobiology of disease, the implications of that are going to be huge moving forward,” said Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But in the short term it’s going to be more expensive.”
To bridge the gap between today and a future where personalized medicine is the norm, companies are reaching for the low-hanging fruit: Cancer.
“The elephant in the room is that 70 percent of the cancer drugs don’t work for their intended use,” said Gerald McDougall, a principal at PriceWaterhouseCoopers Health that focuses on personalized medicine. Because of this, building companion diagnostics around cancer variants and cancer drugs is extraordinarily promising from both a clinical outcome and a revenue perspective, he said.
Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/07/personalized-medicine-high-costs-higher-value/#ixzz37kJILVBc
