no comments | In the life sciences field, personalized medicine will replace the one-size-fits-all model that is currently in place, thus providing the ability to deliver high-quality, cost-effective health care.
Lisa Haile is an attorney specializing in life sciences.
This is according to many speakers at a presentation I attended. It was sponsored by The Personalized Medicine Coalition and the California Healthcare Institute at Pfizer La Jolla.
Several leaders in the field of personalized medicine, including Catherine Mackey, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Pfizer Global Research and Development; Mark Stevenson, President and COO of Life Technologies; and Eric J. Topol, M.D., Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, spoke about the current landscape of personalized medicine.
It will be critical for physicians to understand disease at the molecular level before prescribing drugs and they will be able to “get it right” the first time without costing patients needless time and money on therapies that were inappropriate for their particular disease state.
Dr. Mackey discussed a new drug being developed at Pfizer for non-small cell lung carcinom that is based on having activity only in patients who test positive for the presence of a particular mutation. She indicated that this genetic test will allow physicians to determine which patients with particular tumors will respond to the drug.
Dr. Topol told the audience that in the last week alone, major genes for multiple sclerosis, for about 4 percent of all ovarian cancers, and for testicular cancer were discovered and reported.
These discoveries will lead to specific drugs being developed that will hit at the cause of the disease, reducing side effects and showing higher efficacy rates. He expressed that pharmacogenomics is just now really taking hold and provided Erbitux as a key example.
This drug costs as much as $50,000 per year for patients, yet it has been misdirected in the past and doesn’t help in the majority of colon cancer cases. A particular K-ras mutation determines whether the drug would be effective or not, however, this discovery is only recent and millions of dollars have already been spent needlessly on patients for whom the drug never could have worked.
Dr. Topol discussed a similar situation with Plavix, where as many as 30 percent to 50 percent of the Asian population are resistant because they cannot convert the drug to its active metabolite. This kind of information is invaluable when prescribing the right drug for the right patient.
Dr. Topol mentioned that of the approximately 800,000 doctors in the U.S., only about 10,000 knew what a SNP was and what its importance was to finding the right medicine for the right patient.
Dr. Topol emphasized that educating the physicians was critical now so that when patients come in with data from genome screening, they can make accurate assessments with respect to the right treatment, saving both money and lives in the process.
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