The big-pharma firm that saw the future

Long ago Roche bet on personalised health care. Now its time has come.

 The Paradox of Precision Medicine

Early attempts to tailor disease treatment to individuals based on their DNA have met with equivocal success, raising concerns about a push to scale up such efforts.

 We Don't Just Need Precision Medicine, We Need Precision Health

The vision would be to go beyond Precision Medicine: instead of a frantic race to cure disease after the fact, we can increasingly focus on preventing disease before it strikes. By focusing on health and wellness, we can also have a meaningful impact in reducing healthcare costs. At Stanford, we call this idea Precision Health, where we focus on helping individuals thrive based on all the factors that are unique to their lives, from their genetics to their environment.

 What Precision Medicine Can Learn from the NFL

We suggest looking to the NFL. Of course, there are major differences between the National Football League and precision medicine--no analogy is ever perfect. But if the precision medicine community could take some cues from this enterprise and create a culture of individual and joint value, it could lead to cheaper and more rapid discoveries, testing and commercialization of new therapies that can save patient lives.

 What’s Next For Precision Medicine?

A panel of experts discuss the potential—and the potential pitfalls—of the medical model that proposes personalized, targeted health care.

 Why Cardiology Is Ripe to Become the Next Frontier for Precision Medicine

As with any major change in the practice of medicine, precision medicine will have to build slowly towards relevance in the field of cardiology. But the astounding promise of recent gains in other therapeutic areas underscores the potential associated with identifying subgroups of patients who can benefit from a targeted treatment. In cardiovascular disease, precision medicine may result in much-needed innovation in the field and has the potential to eventually change the way we treat heart diseases altogether.

 Will 'Precision Medicine' Ever Arrive?

There are few diagnoses more terrifying to patients than cancer. And accordingly, there are few visions of future healthcare that are more comforting than those promised by “precision medicine,” the idea that medical treatment will be wondrously personalized and efficient, and possibly spare us—through genomics, genetic testing, and studying personal data—from cancers and other dreaded disease. Will we ever get there?

A Path for Precision Medicine

The goal of precision medicine is to give the diabetes patient — and many others — the same sort of molecular diagnosis and targeted treatment as today’s breast cancer patient.

Bespoke Health Care

Precision medicine won’t work without precision questions.

DNA sequencer raises doctors' hopes for personalized medicine

Among the many stents, surgical clamps, pumps and other medical devices that have recently come before the Food and Drug Administration for clearance, none has excited the widespread hopes of physicians and researchers like a machine called the Illumina MiSeqDx. The device could accelerate the use of genetic information in everyday medical care, physicians hope, improving diagnoses and treatments.

Drug Industry Bets Big On Precision Medicine: Five Trends Shaping Care Delivery

Precision medicine promises a paradigm shift in care delivery, one that removes the need for guesswork, variable diagnoses and treatment strategies based on generalized demographics. Precision medicine approaches are enabled by data leveraged from direct and indirect sources to provide a more holistic view of an individual patient.

Every Patient a Subject

Personalized medicine, the hoped-for use of the information in our genes to inform our medical care, may end up helping people live longer, healthier lives. Or it may not—the jury is still out. But one thing is certain: As our unique genomic data enter our medical records, researchers will be tempted to use that invaluable resource. The results may be good for science but bad for patients’ privacy.

How Precision Medicine Will Shift from Research to Clinical Care

Precision medicine is an exciting area of innovation, but there's a long way to go before research meets quality clinical care.

Personalized Medicine Is Here

For the first time, patients don’t have to go through a physician to learn about potential risks related to their genetic makeup. As long as 23andMe meets the FDA’s “special controls” for subsequent tests, they won’t have to get premarket clearance from regulators. Other companies will benefit from the same regulatory pathway after they receive their first approval for similar types of tests.

Personalized Medicine vs. ObamaCare

Personalized medicine is the future. It is where the science is going. It is where the technology is going. It is where doctors and patients will want to go. Yet unfortunately for many of us, this is not where the Obama administration wants to go.

Spitomics: The promise and perils of 'personalized' medicine

There's a genetic testing revolution underway at your local hospital. And it's causing doctors and medical students to confront some very thorny issues. "Personalized medicine" uses genetic information derived from tests to predict a patient's chances of coming down with diseases and offers ways of tailoring some cures.

The Limits of Personalized Medicine

A new study suggests that knowing their genetic risk of disease doesn’t motivate people to change their behavior.

The Many Reasons Why Personalized Medicine Is So Tricky

Why exactly is personalized medicine such a challenge? The reasons might seem obvious – genes are really, really small; it’s hard to get enough people to study any particular target; cancer, the disease in which personalized therapy has been most touted, probably results from a combination of many genetic mutations and it’s hard to know just which one to blame.

US can't afford to be left behind in precision medicine 'gold rush'

Often called the next “space race” because of the immense technological advances required to make it a reality, precision medicine allows clinicians to advance beyond the relatively coarse diagnostic and therapeutic categories of the present day, towards a more targeted, fine-grained system...