From Blockbuster Medicine to Personalized Medicine
Jan Tr⊘st J⊘rgensen · Personalized Medicine · 2007
One of the biggest challenges for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in the 21st century will be to develop and deliver drugs that fit the individual patient's biology and pathophysiology. This change from blockbuster medicine to personalized medicine will, to a large extent, influence the way that drugs are going to be developed, marketed and prescribed in the future. These changes could mean an end to the blockbuster philosophy in 'big pharma' and thereby impose major changes in company structures. The implementation of personalized medicine will be a stepwise process, where the division of patients into biological subgroups will be the first important step. Today, this is already the situation for several cancer diseases, for example, breast cancer. In the years to come, we will see more and more drugs being prescribed based on the results from pharmacodiagnostic testing. Within cancer medicine, which has been at the forefront of this field, it is expected that in 10-15 years time very few drugs will be prescribed without such a test.