Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative: The Key To A Patient-Centric Industry?

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

Last week’s State of the Union speech made headlines as Obama announced his Precision Medicine Initiative — a new endeavor to bring personalized medicine to the forefront. While there was very little detail about the initiative given during the speech, we do know that Obama is calling for hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the initiative, and the initiative “will have bipartisan support,” Louisiana’s senator Bill Cassidy told The New York Times.

The President’s bare-bones plans earned the approval of The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), which emphasized how the promising effort will allow “access to study data by researchers in academia, government, and the biopharma industry.”

There will be more details released about the initiative in the upcoming weeks, but since the announcement, there has been some chatter about what is needed, beyond the millions in funding, to pull the initiative off. As The Washington Post blog by Lenny Bernstein outlines, we need a whole heck of a lot of data — and it might not necessarily all be from patients. Keith Yamamoto, vice-chancellor for research at UC San Francisco, paints a future where diagnosing and treating individuals will rely on basic science research and the analysis of data from other species.

It all comes down to collecting the right data to “form a rich picture about a patient,” David Shaywitz, CMO of genomics cloud computing startup DNANexus, told Medcity News.

Various initiatives, such as the Cancer Genome Project, have provided seemingly-endless amounts of data, but what’s needed now are efforts to consolidate and interpret that data — a pressing issue for many industries beyond pharma. According to Medcity News, cloud computing is a “critical component of precision medicine,” as it would help consolidate data and make it easier for researchers to make sense of sequencing data.

However, to also ensure that the right patients are identified in a timely manner, one Forbes reader argues in his comment to a recent Forbes column that there is also a need for technology that will “allow optimal patient stratification in real-time,” making it easier for the appropriate patients to be identified right off the bat.

Besides illuminating the need for new technologies, this initiative and the eventual development/release of precision medicines will most likely stir up more debate about the sky-high prices of medicines. In UCSF’s statement of approval over Obama’s recent announcement, the university pinpoints how this initiative will be key to getting the right drugs to the most appropriate patients “cost-effectively”— a term that is proving relative across this industry.

However, as drug companies continue to invest in medicines that are highly effective, but for much smaller patient populations, Forbes columnist David Kroll argues the industry will need to become more comfortable with escalating prices as these are poised to become “the norm.”  He takes the value-based approach: higher-priced medicines with high efficacy rates will be better off for the market in the long run than other current treatment methods (e.g. he references Sovaldi vs. liver transplants).

The pricing of medicines is too complicated and broad of an issue to address here, but we’ll no doubt be hearing more about it in the months and years ahead. (If you’re interested in reading more on the topic of high drug prices, the Wall Street Journal blog recently focused on the launch prices of cancer drugs — many of which grew as the drugs extended the overall time of survival, according to a recent study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.)

There’s a lot of work ahead, and Obama’s support for the Precision Medicine’s Initiative is just the start. However, the fact this initiative has been brought to the forefront of the government’s attention is a good step towards a more patient-centric future in the pharma industry.

A prime focus in the clinical space right now is ensuring that clinical trials best meet patient needs and that patients remain engaged, educated, and connected to the industry as a whole. The development and release of more precision medicines into the market could only mean that we as an industry will be succeeding at making the patient and the intricacies of their diseases the center of the drug development and clinical process.