Our consultancy firm’s publication | CEPTON Strategies
From risk profiling to gene therapy and molecular diagnostics, personalized medicine opens new, exciting fields to medical research. Not only is it good news for the patients: considerable improvements are at stake, both for health systems and pharmaceutical firms now struggling to reinvent themselves. But the road ahead is still full of obstacles.
The concept of personalized medicine was introduced two decades ago by the Swiss company Roche. The initial concept was based on a simple reality in medical practice: the same drug may induce different reactions according to patients, and for a given patient, some drugs work while others don’t.
With the introduction of a treatment of breast cancer in the 1990’s, Roche demonstrated that it was possible to anticipate which patients would or would not benefit from the treatment.
It became therefore possible to personalize treatments, that is to administer a drug only to those patients who would react positively to it. The impact of this new approach is huge: a better efficiency, less side-effects, and no more waste of time and resources spent on a treatment that does not work.