Are Genetic Diseases the key to Personalized and Stratified Medicines?
Thanks for such a good response to our posts on Rare and Genetic Diseases. We also wrote about Personalized Medicines and Biomarkers a month ago. Since we were talking about Rare Diseases, I thought of re-visiting the topic of Personalized Medicine and highlight the importance of the Rare Diseases Clinical Development experience in setting a model in the field of Personalized and Stratified Medicines.
The concept that the same medicine will work for almost all patients (blockbuster approach) has surpassed now. Patients due to their different genotype and phenotype can respond differently to the same drug. With some great breakthroughs, path breaking research and our better understanding of human genome, companies can now develop drugs to match the therapies to specific patient groups. This is known as stratified medicine. Researchers worldwide now believe that personalized and stratified medicines benefit all the parties - patients, healthcare systems and the drug companies. Imagine the significant impact it will have on patients by saving them the time to heal and reducing the possibility of adverse reactions and disease progression. Drug companies will be able to market their drugs to specific patient groups more effectively. And these two factors will lead to lesser healthcare costs.
So, why are drug companies not doing enough in this field yet? Well, we believe that the current system does not provide enough incentives to the companies to focus their efforts on stratified medicines. First, it is expensive and a complex process to develop stratified medicines - finding right set of patients is a big challenge for the R&D groups here. Second, the business models followed by pharmaceutical companies make them develop drugs targeted towards large number of patients. Developing stratified medicines would need changes in the business model and pricing structures of the medicines.
But once the right system is put in place and right amount of effort is spent on more research towards developing personalized and stratified medicines, the patients will be greatly benefited from this step. Researchers have shown significant reductions in costs for patients who used personalized medicines as compared to the medicines targeted to a larger set of patients.
Definitions of Personalized medicine on the Web:
- Wikipedia: Personalized medicine involves the systematic use of information about each individual patient to select or optimize the patient's preventative and therapeutic care.
- iSciWNY: Management of a patient's medical condition on the basis of the use of diagnostic tools employing molecular analysis of the patient's genome to achieve the optimal medical outcomes for that individual.
- BioBankCentral: "The use of molecular analysis methods to better manage a patient's disease or disease predisposition. These methods include testing for variations in genes, gene expression, proteins, and metabolites.
- KineMed: Personalized Medicine (PM) embodies the concept of getting the right medicines to the right patients at the right doses.
- Biotech U: he practice of medicine in which therapies are developed for and directed at the patients most likely to benefit from them.
- The use of genetic susceptibility or pharmacogenetic testing to tailor an individual's preventive care or drug therapy.
- Wikipedia: Stratified medicine is the management of a group of patients with shared biological characteristics by using molecular diagnostic testing to select the most optimal therapy in order to achieve the best possible medicinal outcome for that group .
Do you think the Genetic Disease model can help the development of personalized and stratified medicines? We would love to hear your opinions and any personal experiences and opinions with personalized and stratified medicines.