Economics of Personalized Medicine

Jain, Kewal K.

Personalized medicine may sound expensive, but it will by avoiding unnecessary and ineffective treatments, it will improve healthcare as well as quality of life with reduction of disease burden that will have an impact on all aspects of human life. This will be lowering high cost of healthcare. Expansion of personalized medicine will increase the value of both pharmaceutical and diagnostic markets although the exact value of this enhancement may not be separable in markets that were growing even prior to the concept of personalized medicine. There are a limited number of drugs that can be called personalized medicines, but the market value will increase due to expansion of technologies that are integrated to develop personalized medicine. These technologies have other applications in medicine and pharma industry and the markets overlap. This chapter discusses the cost of molecular diagnostics, genotyping, and sequencing as well as pharmacogenomics-based clinical trials. Cost-effectiveness of applications of personalized medicine is also analyzed.