Over the last 20 years, talking
points around the subject of genomics and personalized medicine have become
topics that could revolutionize the way that healthcare providers and other
specialized fields handle therapy for patients. In 2007, President Barack Obama
introduced a bill to the U.S. Senate titled The Genomics and Personalized
Medicine Act of 2007 which sought to secure the promise of personalized
medicine for all Americans by expanding and accelerating genomics research and
initiatives to improve the accuracy of disease diagnosis, increase the safety
of prescription drugs, and identify novel treatments. Buzzwords like
bio-banking, genetic testing, and whole genome sequencing hover around this
document, bringing mixed thoughts on the issue among the public. The ethics of
informed consent upon request of genomic information and what information is to
be divulged to the patient upon request can be a difficult issue to
de-convolute.
The
ability to incorporate genomic information to therapy management for
individualized care comes from the idea that two individual patients can have
entirely different responses to the same drug, and based on the variations in
genetic characteristics and biomarkers that result from these variations, it
may be possible to predict and prevent serious adverse events for high risk
medications. Cutting post-ADR costs at the emergency room can have huge
implications to lowering health care spending from a preventive perspective.
Recently,
Xconomy,business and technolgy giant out located in Boston, MA, organized a
Forum named Big Data Meets Big Biology in San Diego, hosting experts in fields
such as genomics (Stephen Kingsmore, President
and CEO, Rady Pediatric Genomics and Systems Medicine Institute), human biology
(Nicholas Schork, Professor and Director of Human Biology, J. Craig Venter
Institute), and many more to discuss the future challenges of next-generation
genome sequencing and how a coordinated systems approach is needed to make
steady progress in bringing these technologies to the utilization of the
patient. One very interesting quote from Illumina CEO Francis deSouza during
that forum was that " the data required by Netflix for all of its
digital movies, television series, and other online programs is roughly equivalent
to 200,000 human genomes. The centerpiece of a U.S. “precision medicine”
initiative announced last year is a population-scale study of 1 million
American individuals and their genomes."
Currently it is possible to
sequence the full genome of a patient for approximately $1000, where it used to
be $3 billion for just one patient 15 years ago. I feel that with this trend
towards finding more cost-efficient strategies to provide genomic information
that can belong to the consumers in healthcare, hopefully this can not only
build a road to more cost-effective therapies, but also put the control of
individual care into the hands of the patient as they can physically own their
own genomic results in a portable way that can be utilized by healthcare providers
from numerous fields.
No comments:
Post a Comment