Boston-based Immuneering has pulled together the most concrete business case I’ve yet seen for the sort of Personalized Healthcare system we’re trying to build with Healthcare IT plugged into bioinformatics and genomics. In a nutshell:
1. Take a drug like Novartis’ Proleukin, which has a one in ten chance of giving a long-lasting remission to kidney cancer or melanoma – BUT at a cost of $60,000 and with nasty side effects that may put patients in the intensive care unit.
2. Now build a $5,000 – $6,000 test that looks at proteins expressed on the surface of immune cells and inflammatory proteins in the blood, to predict whether that $60,000 Proleukin treatment will actually work for this patient.
Looks like the ideal win-win-win scenario. Patients win by gaining advance intel into whether a painful and expensive treatment is likely to do them more good than harm. Insurance companies win by weeding out patients who are likely to fail at a therapy in advance of investment. And Novartis wins by taking a drug that doctors might not prescribe today, knowing the potential downside, and making it far easier to prescribe to patients that will respond favorably.
Sound exciting? Sure does to me!
