Driving Forces Behind the Past and Future Emergence of Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Personalized medicine can be seen as a continuously developing approach to tailoring treatments according to the individual characteristics of a patient. In some way, medicine has always been personalized. During the last decade, however, scientific and technological progress have made truly personalized healthcare increasingly become reality. Today’s personalized medicine involves targeted therapies and diagnostic tests. The development of targeted agents represents a major investment opportunity to pharmaceutical companies, which have been facing the need to diversify their business due to an increasingly challenging market place. By investing into the development of personalized therapies, pharmaceutical companies mitigate a major part of the risks posed by factors such as patent expiries or generic competition. Viewing upon personalized medicine from different perspectives points out the multi-causality of its emergence. Research efforts and business diversification have been two main driving forces; they do supplement each other, however, are not jointly exhaustive in explaining the emergence of this approach. Especially in the future, a number of further stakeholders will impact the evolution of personalized medicine.

Current landscape of personalized medicine adoption and implementation in Southeast Asia

“…As PM is an emerging concept, varying awareness and views are reported among a plethora of key players and stakeholders [ 62 , 63 ]. It is suggested that partnerships between scientific research bodies, regulatory agencies, politics, clinicians, pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, and patients/public will be the key success factor [ 64 ]. No single stakeholder can set all the essential requirements to further drive the PM adoption and implementation in healthcare.…”

Personalised Medicine and Medical Imaging: Opportunities and Challenges for Contemporary Health Care

“…While the blockbuster model represented drugs for a high-volume market, the PM model points to a smaller target group. Even though revenues might seem to reduce, the competitive advantage derived from differentiated goods actually results in increased profits driven by margins rather than volume [29]. It therefore indicates that it is possible in theory to obtain similar amount of revenue.…”

“…PM, therefore, offers the industry an opportunity to increase portfolios and productivity. PM involves targeted therapies that have specific modes of action which would be very difficult for generic companies to copy [29]. Genetic sequencing as part of PM, by definition, requires that only validated biomarkers go into advanced stages of clinical trials.…”

Optimal threshold estimator of a prognostic marker by maximizing a time-dependent expected utility function for a patient-centered stratified medicine

“…Stratified medicine currently relies on the use of biological markers capable of discriminating patients into sub-groups receiving the most appropriate treatment. 1,2 The recent opportunities toward this personalized patient care, especially offered by omics technologies, have transformed biomedical research. 3 Despite this, a very low proportion of discovered biomarkers or scoring systems has been transferred to clinical practice.…”