Thinking Forward

This Health Industry Insights Perspective describes a novel approach to marketing personalized medicines (PM) in this increasingly value-conscious global marketplace.

At present, the advance of personalized medicine is heavily dependent on market acceptance of the need to reimburse PM-based diagnostic testing based on the value it delivers. This expectation directly conflicts with current cost-based diagnostics reimbursement practices put in place in the 1980s and is partly responsible for the slow adoption of personalized therapeutics. A second major issue is drug cost, which can be very high for new PM-based therapeutics (as much as $300,000/year/patient). Organizations such as the United Kingdom's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) regularly review new therapeutics and are increasingly finding that these new, expensive personalized therapeutics fail to deliver value, in large part due to their high cost. An alternative, revolutionary approach to new drug market development may provide a solution to this problem.

This document provides insights developed from informal discussions with senior executives from the pharmaceutical industry during a recent Next Generation Pharmaceuticals Research & Development conference held in May 2008. Based in part on its revolutionary approach and the potential repercussions to company strategies, the participants in the discussion will remain anonymous.