Can (and will) Governments Afford Personalized Medicine?

Abstract

'Personalized' (or more specifically targeted) medicines promise aging populations important medium- to long-term benefits, including extended healthy life expectancies. But the time and resources needed to deliver such advances may be significantly greater than optimists expect. Given current methodologies, drugs for limited numbers of older patients are also much less likely to be judged cost effective than treatments for more common conditions in younger populations. There is a consequent danger that private and public funding for personalized medicine development will in the future fall to a level that is significantly below the global public's best interests. Policy-makers should be aware of this risk, and take actions to mitigate it. These include minimizing the costs and complexities associated with marketing personalized medicines and linked diagnostic tests, as well as strengthening intellectual property protection in ways that will allow 'rich world' pharmaceutical price moderation, increased innovator security and enhanced treatment access for poorer populations.

Conceptual Bases of a Quantitative Method for Assessing the Transferability of Medical Technologies Across the Rich-Poor Divide

“…It would take the form of a high-throughput instrumentation for screening the efficacy of a plethora of herbal formulations at once to single out the most effective one or a few for a particular individual (Table 3 .10). Personalized medicine is often being criticized for its expensiveness, for the potential abuse of privacy issues by the insurers, and for widening the gap between the rich and the poor (Taylor & Al-Saeed, 2010 ), but one such combinatorial method proposed here may be a way for closing this gap and lowering the level of mistrust existing between the favorers of the traditional and of the modern medical approaches. Among the contemporary fabrication techniques, the form of additive manufacturing known as 3D printing stands out as the most popular one because of its convenience in designing a variety of geometries across a number of spatial scales in an additive, layer-by-layer fashion.…”