As the cost of drugs and healthcare continues to rise, industry stakeholders are looking to technological innovation for solutions. This has led to a trend towards the development of personalized, or precision, medicine, designed to provide tailored medical care according to a patient’s individual characteristics, needs, preferences and genetic makeup.

FDA says personalized medicine provides “the right patient with the right drug at the right dose at the right time,” and in the near future, patients will not only be able to access medical records online, but will have the ability to add to these records by uploading data from their health apps and wearables. In fact, FDA recently accepted the first New Drug Application for a ‘digital’ medicine in September 2015—the anti-psychotic drug Abilify—with an ingestible sensor attached to monitor patient adherence.

As we went to press, President Obama followed up his announcement in his State of the Union Address with the unveiling of details about his Precision Medicine Initiative, a new $215 million research effort designed to accelerate biomedical discoveries and provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients. The President says the plan is to create research, technology and policies to produce better medicine at a cheaper cost, adding that precision medicine will save money over time because doctors won’t waste time prescribing drugs and treatments that don’t work.

We’ve actually seen over the past several years how pharma continues to move away from the research and development of blockbuster drugs in favor of targeted therapies. Research sponsored by the Personalized Medicine Coalition and conducted by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) found that 42% of all compounds—and 73% of oncology compounds—in the pipeline have the potential to be personalized medicines.

In addition, biopharmaceutical companies nearly doubled their R&D investment in personalized medicines over the past five years, and expect to increase their investment by an additional third in the next five years. Biopharmaceutical researchers also predict a 69% increase in the number of personalized medicines in development over the next five years.

With so many companies investing in personal medicine research, it is clear this has emerged as an important part of the industry and one that will remain so. What long-term impact will this trend have on pharma and contract service providers?

Tim Wright, Editor
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