Personalized Medicine Is Too Expensive

Mark Henderson of The Times (UK) believes that all the talk about personalized medicine (or bespoke medicine as he calls it) is not cost effective enough to be made available to everyone. Drugs that are tailored to an individual’s genetic make-up won’t be used widely because only a small pool of people will have the same genetic variants.

In the long term, some of these extra costs will be balanced by the savings made as broad-spectrum medicines are no longer prescribed to patients in whom they are useless. But before that, the NHS has a problem. It might be able to find the cash to fund one or two expensive novelties such as Herceptin, but what happens when dozens of effective but expensive drugs are queuing for approval, each backed by a patient lobby? The dilemma will be painful. Paying for everything could break the NHS financially, but refusing is equally unnattractive. That would deny thousands of people the best possible treatment, and perhaps even persuade pharmaceutical companies that it is not worth developing targeted drugs: a handful of well-heeled private patients will not repay their investment in research.

It reminds me of the discussion we had last month about genetic enhancement not being a human right. Is personalized medicine a human right or is it only a right of those who can afford it? (The same argument could be made, of course, for healthcare in general.) At what point should patients be encouraged to undergo genetic testing to improve the efficacy of their treatment, e.g., the 2D6 gene and Tamoxifen?

The acceptance and implementation of personalized medicine isn’t going to be quick or easy. Professor Fran Balkwill and Dr. Melanie Lee discusses this further within the context of cancer research at Newton’s Apple.

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