Technology Innovation 2025: Personalized Medicine
As part of our Technology Foresight program, Social Technologies conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy to determine the top 12 areas for technology innovation through 2025. Personalized medicine is the first innovation area in the series.
Personalized medicine: from "one drug for all" to "one drug per case"
Personalized medicine includes the use of gene therapy, pharmacology and information technology to treat each patient individually. The ultimate goal of personalized medicine is to use the information in a person’s genome to move medicine from a reactive to a preventive stance, fixing a potential problem before it occurs rather than after it manifests. Use of genetics in the healthcare sector will give consumers more information about the interplay of disease and their own genomes, providing them the opportunity to take greater control of their healthcare and enabling treatments tailored to specific genomes, moving medicine from “one drug for all” to “one drug per case.”
New technologies in the area of personalized medicine are already being developed and tested. These include:
- Gene chips—The growing use of silicon wafers coated with sensors that detect DNA or other compounds is improving diagnostics by facilitating testing for the presence of certain genes and molecular biomarkers.
- Bioinformatics—Using databases to analyze individual genomes, efforts such as Harvard University’s Personal Genome Project seek to provide doctors information to aid in more precise diagnoses.
- Phenotype pharmacology—Continuing research into the human genome is yielding new insights into how the body metabolizes pharmaceuticals, and efforts are underway to identify drugs that work for select groups with similar phenotypes or genetic profiles.
Challenges ahead
While the idea of personalized medicine is gaining ground in medical and research fields, significant obstacles will need to be overcome before it can flourish commercially. These include:
- Costs—While eventually personalized medicine could reduce healthcare and medical costs, it is currently expensive, particularly as many of the new tests are not yet covered by health insurance. The initial costs of personalized pharmacology might be quite high as well. Reducing patients’ upfront expenses for these technologies would certainly help to promote personalized medicine as patients seize the long-term cost-saving opportunities presented by this approach.
- Technology—The computing power and time needed to sequence a genome are too great to be possible on a mass scale at present. New tools will also be needed to make the analysis of how pharmaceuticals interact with genomes commercially feasible.
- Entrenched systems—While it would ultimately save money for everyone involved, a shift to personalized medicine, with its focus on prevention, amounts to nothing short of a total reimagining of how healthcare is provided. For starters, many insurance providers do not currently cover preventive procedures. A move to personalized medicine would also force the pharmaceutical industry to restructure itself in order to take advantage of the desire for personalized drugs.
Forecasts
The evolution of personalized medicine will change the healthcare industry. In the process, it is likely that several “gamechangers” will emerge—aspects of new technology that will result in significant commercial or social impacts. Some examples of potential gamechangers include:
- Cheap sequencing—On the research side, one of the goals of the National Human Genome Research Institute is to reduce the cost of sequencing an individual genome to $1,000. The cost of sequencing is already starting to drop.
- Fast diagnosis—A new generation of handheld gene scanners will revolutionize genetic testing for disease while cutting analysis time and, eventually, costs.
- Availability of biomarkers—Better understanding of molecular biomarkers and the ability to use microarrays to identify them will also enable less-invasive disease monitoring. For instance, a microarray chip could be used instead of a biopsy to test a patient’s blood for the markers of certain cancers.
Christopher Kent
in Health, Technology Foresight, Top 12 Innovation
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