Reimbursement and Cost
“The promise of Precision Medicine is to leverage highly targeted therapies for the benefit of the patient. By understanding better what makes us unique and leveraging our genetic make up, we hope to improve the outcome for the individual. Now, this blog is focusing on one issue that we collectively have to overcome to make precision medicine a reality. And this issue is simply: Cost.
For some time, lung cancer has turned into the poster child for precision medicine. At this point, it is considered standard care for stage IV patients to identify targetable oncogenic drivers. As an example, the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene has emerged as an important oncogenic driver in a small population of patients with adenocarcinoma. The prescription drug crizotinib has received accelerated US Food and Drug Administration approval when used in conjunction with its companion diagnostic test to identify patients with the EML4-ALK gene rearrangement.”
Read more about it in Our 2 SNPs… here.
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