Executive Roundtable "Personalized Healthcare"

Executive Roundtable "Personalized Healthcare: Hype or the Future of Medicine?" – Speaker statements

Dr. Bärbel Hüsing, Fraunhofer Institute for System and Innovation Research

"During the next few years, we will significantly expand our ability to acquire information about a patient's "biological condition". Today, that information can be used to differentiate between treatments for groups of patients who appear to have uniform profiles. This type of personalized (or better yet, stratified) medicine has the potential to improve the quality of healthcare and reduce misdiagnoses and side effects. Until now, however, use in healthcare is still limited to a few applications, predominantly in the medicinal treatment of cancer.
To make full use of this potential in medical practice and prevent possible mistakes in development, clear-cut incentives must be established to put new biomarkers identified in research to use in clinical applications and prove their clinical validity. Sustainable business models are needed to develop new applications through synergy between research organizations and biotechnology, pharma and medical-technology companies. That calls for the ongoing development of tools for the translation process and legal framework conditions to establish incentives for the rapid transfer of innovative applications to the healthcare sector, at the same time guaranteeing quality, clinical utility, patient safety and consumer protection.
Whether personalized medicine also has the potential to make a broad-based impact on prevention is doubtful. We also need to clarify whether people should have access to knowledge regarding their personal disease risk and how they might translate that into effective, long-term behavior in cognitive, social and economic terms. Commercial products to determine a person's risk profile that address private individuals directly are not scientifically founded: What we need are consumer-protection measures to guarantee the quality of those products and to protect consumers from being misled.
The term personalized medicine has the connotation of providing healthcare that applies specifically to the patient in question. For it to honor this expectation, personalized medicine cannot concentrate solely on molecular disease factors."

Dr. Christian Meisel, Clinical Research and Biomarker Development Department, Roche, Penzberg

"People respond differently to the same therapy, even though they appear to have the same symptoms, findings and illnesses. This problem is as old as the history of medicine itself. Today, personalized medicine plays a key role in modern drug development. Diagnostic and pharmaceutical findings are being combined in the development process for new medications. The results are helping considerably to better recognize target structures for medications or eliminating them from the beginning. It makes it easier to understand the biology of illnesses and helps to develop more effective therapies and tailor medications to specific patient groups. This also means potentially using specific treatments that are known to be effective to cut healthcare costs."

Prof. Horst Domdey, Managing Director of the BioM Biotech Cluster Development GmbH, Munich

"Economic crisis, demographic change, collapse of the health-care system? Regardless of the concrete impact that these hotly debated topics will have on us in the future, our society will not stop looking for new and improved ways to provide relief from and cure illnesses. However, these drugs should truly be effective and have minimal side effects – a prerequisite that to be a matter of course in appearance only and one that, in many cases, today's drugs do not sufficiently satisfy. Thanks to a more detailed analysis of patients and taking molecular diagnostics into account in the choice and/or development of medications, a new era has now begun, i.e. that of genome-based personalized medicine."

Dr. Andreas Ruppert, Scientific Director, Genome Research Center (GRC), Munich

"Today's debate about "personalized medicine" can be traced back to the biotech hype that surrounded the Human Genome Project in the early 1990s. Expectations about being able to quickly identify new drug targets and develop individual therapies remained, for the most part, initially unfulfilled.
However, we are now seeing sustainable growth in the importance of genome, proteome and metabolic biomarkers, which is making it possible to develop more targeted therapies (e.g. in oncology), adjust dosages to an individual's needs and recognize the signs of side effects in specific groups of patients."

Prof. Dr. Christian Peschel, TUM, Director 3rd Medical Clinic, "Klinikum rechts der Isar", Munich

"For many indications, the future of medicinal therapy lies in personalizing treatment as precisely as possible based on biologically defined sub-groups of symptoms. That calls for a perfect understanding of the pathophysiology of the symptom in question and defining pharmacogenetic characteristics for predicting the patient's individual toxicity profile. The purpose of developing clinically relevant biomarkers is to control a molecularly targeted therapy. In the future, the challenge will be to combine biomarker-based diagnostics with targeted therapy in an economically feasible manner, both pre-therapeutically and during treatment."“

Susanne Kutter, Biology Graduate and Editor for Technology + Know-how, "WirtschaftsWoche" magazine

"At some point, everyone who had been writing about topics related to biotech and medicine got tired of hearing about "personalized medicine". In 1999, 2000 and 2001, the topic dominated media coverage because the human genome had been deciphered and gene chips were supposed to promote nice, new tailor-made therapies. However, with the exception of the breast-cancer drug Herceptin, which was very helpful for a specific group of women with cancer who met an exact genetic profile, but no one else, there were no marketable examples for several years. Then there was a long period of silence because the pharma companies were not longer sure if "one pill fits all" might be a more profitable blockbuster that is easier to market than personal pills for each individual. Later, the topic was gradually revived, particularly in the case of cancer medications, but discussions are much quieter than they were during the first wave. One thing surprised me at the end of 2009/beginning of 2010: In a "WirtschaftsWoche" survey about what trends would emerge in the new year, nine out of 17 people from the biotech and pharma sectors said "personalized medicine". That makes me all the more excited to find out what concrete projects and products the participants at this year's roundtable have to introduce – and what chances they give this new form of medicine.