The Quest for Affordable Personalized Medicine

Catherine Auten

Recently, doctors and geneticists have begun treating cancer patients by studying each patient’s individual biological pathway and prescribing a treatment tailored for that individual. This is known as personalized medicine. Unfortunately, the cost of personalized medicine is extremely high. Entering into the debate about how to make this type of treatment more affordable are the articles “Getting Personal” and “Does Comparative-Effectiveness Research Threaten Personalized Medicine?” While both articles agree that personalized medicine is too expensive, the author of “Getting Personal” suggests that the government should step in to find a way to lower the costs of personalized medicine. Meanwhile, the authors of “Does Comparative-Effectiveness Research Threaten Personalized Medicine?” suggest that group studies can provide a less expensive way to conduct research which could lead to more affordable personalized medicine. The “Getting Personal” article convinces the reader that personalized medicine is an important treatment, but when it comes down to finding a solution for making it affordable, the author calls for a sort of deus ex machina; the “Does Comparative-Effectiveness Research Threaten Personalized Medicine?” article proposes the specific solution of comparative-effectiveness research to lower the cost of personalized medicine potentially making it an affordable and effective means of treating cancer.


In “Getting Personal” the author begins the article by stating how important providing personalized medicine is. France is cited as an example for a good model of personalized health care. In France, there are twenty-eight testing sites where genetic material can be sent and tested to identify any unique pathways which could benefit from personalized medicine (“Getting Personal”). While this does allow for comprehensive genetic testing, it is an extremely expensive process. Patients can pay around $28,000 for some drugs and this testing and treatment plan is costing the country of France somewhere around thirty-five million Euros (“Getting Personal”). 

 The author of “Getting Personal” notes that “some assessments” claim that cost-benefit analysis shows that targeted medicine is not beneficial enough for its high cost. Also, many doctors are resistant to having their patients’ samples sent to a geneticist and leaving treatment options up to a bureaucratic system (“Getting Personal”). However, the author claims that these problems should be addressed by the European Commission’s health directorate (“Getting Personal”). Unfortunately, other than stating that the European Commission’s health directorate should encourage more research to be done on the more affordable treatments, there is little to be said about how to lower the cost of this extremely expensive type of treatment (“Getting Personal”).

In the article “Does Comparative-Effectiveness Research Threaten Personalized Medicine?” the authors’ thesis is that even though comparative-effectiveness research is conducted in a group setting rather than individually, it can actually speed up the process of personalized medicine. The authors claim that the current studies that assess clinical effectiveness are inadequate. These inadequacies result in many genetic tests having little actual benefit for the patient. The authors write that “without knowing how well these strategies work, physicians can't easily apply them or convince patients that a test is worth the out-of-pocket cost” (link). This, they claim, is the chief problem facing personalized medicine.

The solution to the lack of information surrounding personalized medication, these authors believe, is the comparative-effectiveness research which allows researchers to conduct less costly studies and gather the same information they would receive from carrying out research on individuals. The authors state that the boost in federal funding given to comparative-effectiveness research “will support research that is both more comprehensive — and more relevant to real-world clinical decisions than traditional clinical research” (link).


Works Cited


“Getting Personal.” Nature 473 (19 May 2011): 253–254, Web. 29 January 2012.