Recently, Dan Renick, Co-President and Chief Commercial Officer, Precision for Medicine spoke with CEOCFO Magazine on the Future of Precision Medicine. Below is an excerpt from the article:
CEOCFO: Mr. Renick, your site indicates the tagline “The Future of Medicine Is Precision.” How so?
Mr. Renick: We feel—and of course the market largely feels this way as well—that the focus is shifting away from the treatment of large populations for conditions that have been the focus for a number of years: cholesterol reduction, blood pressure control, diabetes control, and so on. We have a number of good therapies that are on the market and more still to come. And there are still unmet needs in those therapeutic areas. However, both for those unmet needs as well as more specialized needs in a range of oncology and specialty conditions—including rare and orphan disease states—there is much more targeting of individuals based on the fact that we have the technology to do that now. Therefore, through biomarkers and other genomic capabilities, we can now have research and development throughput that is much more focused than it has been in the past. It allows us to address a number of unmet needs with true medical breakthroughs.
CEOCFO: Where does Precision for Medicine come in? How do you play a part?
Mr. Renick: There are two ways that Precision for Medicine plays a part. We have one portion of the company that is very focused on supporting the early research effort that focuses on the use of biomarkers within clinical trials to be able to target patients in a more personalized and precise manner. Therefore, through that and through the stratification of high-risk patient groups, we can improve the efficiency or we can support our clients to improve the efficiency of the research and development process. We see numerous news reports about how expensive it is and how long it takes to get a drug to market. Through these collective efforts, the industry at large wants to shorten that, so that a patient who has an unmet need can perhaps be the beneficiary of a medical breakthrough sooner. However, that is only part of the equation. The other part is how we can assign value to these medical breakthroughs and determine how we are going to pay for them; not only how much we will pay, but how we might go about paying for these things in the future.
To read more of the article, visit CEOCFO Magazine here.