Guest guest Posted October 3, 2008 Report Share Posted October 3, 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/28/AR2008092802482.\ html A Glimpse Into Personalized Medicine of the Future By Kendra Marr Monday, September 29, 2008; Page D04 Perhaps it was the purple starry night backdrop or the strange silver poles lined up on stage, but G. Steven Burrill seemed to have arrived from the future. Addressing AdvaMed 2008, a medical technology industry conference in Washington last week, he spoke about the upcoming era of personalized medicine. Soon all health care will be Wal-Mart-ized, said Burrill, chief executive of Burrill & Co., a San Francisco life sciences merchant bank. When you walk into a superstore, you would drop a sample of blood or saliva on a BlackBerry-type device. When you're done shopping for groceries, the store would present you with a printout of your ailments and a bag of personalized medication. That medication would also contain digestible computer chips, which would relay real-time reports on your body's fluctuations. Imagine, said Burrill, wearing " smart " clothing, filled with probes and sensors that would monitor our health. " And I'm not in la-la land because I've been on too many airplanes, " he said. " It's going to happen sooner than later. We already have most of this technology. " Glimpses already are available: Two years ago Nike partnered with Apple to put sensors in sneakers, which track your run, then send that data to your iPod. It won't be long before we start embedding microchips filled with genetic information into newborns, Burrill said. So, one day, if they have a heart attack in Dubai, any doctor could easily access their entire medical history. " Today, if I have a heart attack in Dubai, I'm in deep yogurt, " he said, joking. To the crowd, Burrill's ideas were hardly far-fetched. After all, this was coming from the man considered one of the original architects of biotechnology. His annual report is considered the leading authority on industry trends. But Burrill isn't the first to dream up this health-care utopia. Personalized medicine has long been a popular buzz word among politicians, doctors and scientists predicting the future of medicine. In announcing his plan, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) invoked the potential power of personalized medicine. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has repeatedly pushed the agency to encourage personalized diagnosis and treatment. The X-Prize Foundation, an educational nonprofit, is offering a $10 million prize to whoever can develop technology that cuts the cost and time of sequencing a genome. At AdvaMed 2008, I also caught up with Glen T. Giovannetti, head of Ernst & Young's global biotechnology practice, which publishes an annual industry report. He offered his analysis of how this new frontier might be achieved. The science behind personalized medicine is advancing rapidly, he said. Cancer patients are already using targeted drugs, such as Herceptin. Companies such as Vanda Pharmaceuticals of Rockville are applying genetics to tailor drug discovery, clinical trials and marketing compounds to the right patients. Soon personalized medicine will reinvent business models, Ernst & Young predicts. Today drug companies profit by selling large volumes of low-priced products. In the future, high-priced personalized medicine will be sold in low volumes. This also means altering benchmarks evaluating cost benefits. Today society is being asked whether we are willing to pay $50,000 to extend a cancer patient's life by three months -- a heart-wrenching decision for doctors and loved ones, said Giovannetti. Personalized medicine will be expensive, but society will also need to assess its total impact. For example, targeted drugs could lower costs in other parts of the health-care system by eliminating ineffective therapies. Legislative logistics guiding personalized medicine still need to be sorted out. How will we reimburse diagnostic tests? How quickly will doctors and hospitals make use of medical records that includes genetic information? Who will build IT infrastructure to handle the massive amounts of data? Kendra Marr's " Vital Signs " column focuses on the region's biotech and health care scene. Check out her weekly roundup of biotech news each Friday on the WashBiz Blog. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted October 3, 2008 Report Share Posted October 3, 2008 Personalized medicine sounds like they can control how often you get sick and maybe even push a button to make you die. Its all about keeping you sick until you no longer can pay your medical bills then getting rid of you. Sick jerks. Josephine , " Jane MacRoss " <highfield1 wrote: > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/28/AR2008092802482.\ html > > A Glimpse Into Personalized Medicine of the Future > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted October 3, 2008 Report Share Posted October 3, 2008 No difference to the present methods at all - just quicker. And people love it. People want it and in fact people demand it. If you disagree - then you are not a nurse. Jane " jlkinkona " <josephine Personalized medicine sounds like they can control how often you get sick and maybe even push a button to make you die. Its all about keeping you sick until you no longer can pay your medical bills then getting rid of you. Sick jerks. Josephine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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