Personalised medicines are one of those innovations that are so patently a good idea it is almost inconceivable that they will not be the norm in 10 or 20 years’ time. Taking pharmaceuticals without checking your molecular make up for side-effect risks will probably be seen as stupid, or worse, the subject of negligence claims. It will be like force-feeding a baby peanuts before their allergy risk is known.
‘Personalised medicines promise to deliver great value for patients: ensuring better targeting of medicines, improved response rates for medicines, fewer patients needlessly exposed to the risk of side-effects from ineffective medicines, and overall, more efficient use of healthcare resources,’ Thomas Metcalfe, chair of the personalised medicines task force of the European Biopharmaceutical Enterprises, told a recent European Commission conference on the subject.
It seems to be a win-win situation – but getting to a position where the pharma industry can design and deliver safe personalised medicines to a market whose biological make-up will be immeasurably diverse is not going to be easy. It will inevitably require a close relationship with clinicians – with information being fed both ways – and such transparency will be hard to manage in as competitive an industry as the pharmaceutical sector.
Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, the director of the Commission’s health research directorate said this will require the various arms of the healthcare sector to co-operate and be strategic: ‘The healthcare community needs to take a long-term structured approach to foster innovation in this area. And this will require working together,’ she said.
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