Executive Summary

Click here to download the full 2009 report.

Click here to view a table of select tartegeted drugs, treatments, and diagnostics.

A tectonic shift is taking place in medicine. For the average patient the movement is subtle, perhaps imperceptible, but ultimately it will affect the entire landscape of our healthcare system. Since the mapping of the human genome in 2003, the pace of discovery, product development, and clinical adoption of what we know as personalized medicine has accelerated.

Personalized medicine may be considered an extension of traditional approaches to understanding and treating disease, but with greater precision. A profile of a patient’s genetic variation can guide the selection of drugs or treatment protocols that minimize harmful side effects or ensure a more successful outcome. It can also indicate susceptibility to certain diseases before they become manifest, allowing the physician and patient to set out a plan for monitoring and prevention. Physicians can now go beyond the “one size fits all” model of medicine to make the most effective clinical decisions for individual patients.

Personalized medicine offers a structural model for efficient healthcare. It is preventive, coordinated, and evidence-based. It relies on a network of electronic health records that link clinical and molecular information to help patients and physicians make optimal treatment decisions. It is proactive and participatory, engaging patients in lifestyle choices and active health maintenance to compensate for genetic susceptibilities.

Substantial progress has been made towards the implementation of personalized medicine. When all of the pieces of infrastructure fall into place; when we begin to classify and treat diseases not just by their most obvious signs and symptoms, but also by their molecular profiles; when physicians combine their knowledge and judgment with a network of linked databases that help them interpret and act upon a patient’s genomic information; when insurance companies pay for tests and treatments that anticipate the needs of the patient as much as react to them; and when regulators insist on using all information available to the physician, including genetic tests, to ensure the safety and efficacy of an approved drug, then “personalized medicine” will be known, simply, as medicine.

The Personalized Medicine Coalition publised the second edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine in May 2009. This report details how personalized medicine plays an increasingly integral role in delivering high-quality, cost-effective healthcare and presents evidence that personalized medicine will continue to grow in importance as scientific breakthroughs are translated into a new generation of targeted therapeutics.

The Personalized Medicine Coalition published the first edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine in November 2006. This document presented the early evidence that personalized medicine has proven its value and that it would continue to grow in importance, while at the same time acknowledging that uncertainties remained concerning its full impact. Click here to download the full 2006 report.