Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
There was much hope that the advent of the Human Genome Project would lead to significant innovations as we began to learn more and more about how genes relate to disease. The ability of translating this knowledge to targeted therapies, however, is challenging. One key issue is how many genetic mutations cause a disease; it…
Cell and gene therapies have the potential to produce dramatic improvements in quality of life and survival for severe and often rare diseases. Currently, however, the cost of these treatments is high and access is sometimes limited. To identify some of these challenges in Europe EURODIS conducted an evaluation of country-specific challenges with respect to…
Let’s say that drug A works better for one race than another. Or that disease prevalence is more common for some races than others. Despite the goal to be color-blind in medicine, racial information can prove useful. For instance, sickle cell disease is much more common among African Americans in the US than other races.…
A recent viewpoint from Fendrick and Shope (2018) argues for the need for Precision Benefit Design. Successful implementation of precision medicine will need to address several system-wide challenges, including administrative complexities, the creation of new financing models, and aligning provider- and patient-focused initiatives. The enormous clinical potential of precision medicine sheds light on the critical…
That’s the title of my article released today in U.S. News and World Report. Here is an excerpt. A number of health care industry leaders are making big bets that the future of health care lies in precision medicine. This July, Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg donated $10 million to the University of California-San Francisco’s…
Check out my latest article at MedCity News looking at how the advent of precision medicine will affect patients, regulators and payers. The article describes how precision medicine will be good for patients. Precision medicines will likely be more expensive that regular therapies, but–because they are targeted to more specific populations–aggregate spending on pharmaceuticals could increase…
Currently, pharmaceutical treatments that are used in the U.S. need to gain an approval from the FDA. The FDA’s approval is contingent on a demonstration of efficacy and safety in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). However, precision medicine makes the standard FDA approval problematic. As described in Breckenridge et al. (2016), in the precision medicine…
I am attending a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Pre-Conference on Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision Medicine. You can find the meeting agenda here. The speakers today were very interesting and touched on a number of topics with respect to precision medicine including: Measuring the value of a precision medicine diagnostic test Determining…