Balancing the Need for Guidance, Communications, and Education to Support Innovation in Personalized Medicine Diagnostics

Recently, I had the opportunity to moderate a thought-provoking panel at the PMC/BIO Solutions Summit. The summit brought together key stakeholders to discuss solutions to barriers in the development of innovative personalized medicine diagnostics. A big question for those developing potentially game-changing technologies in an increasingly cost conscious environment is the need for “Evidentiary Standards and Data Requirements for Payer Coverage.”

Determining the data requirements for coverage is becoming an increasingly frustrating issue for diagnostics manufacturers, which face rising demands for evidence but continued lack of clarity about payer standards for evidence-based decision-making, leading many to ask the question, “Why can’t payers just tell us what their standards are?” Complicating the picture is that diagnostics can come to market via different pathways with different levels of supporting evidence (e.g., companion diagnostics reviewed by FDA for clinical validity with the companion therapeutic and tests developed, validated, and introduced to the market by laboratories).

The panelists – who represented leaders from industry, non-profit advocacy, and government working to create solutions for some of these market access barriers – noted a couple of issues at play. One is that having a payer “pick list” or hard criteria for coverage removes the flexibility that is so often needed in these gray-area coverage decisions. The second is that given the volume of products they are evaluating, most payers don’t have the bandwidth to be experts in the nuances of the trial design for every technology. Third is that across all stakeholders, there is a wide range of knowledge on innovative products and personalized medicine and that basic education for the majority of stakeholders to better understand these products is lacking.

Several lessons and next steps came out of this discussion. First, panelists agreed that there must be more education for all stakeholders so that each stakeholder can actually evaluate novel products appropriately, a key finding echoed throughout the day. Second, the emphasis on outcomes must shift from only clinical outcomes to clinical outcomes and quality of life for patients. Finally, all panelists agreed the ideal situation is open, trusting lines of communication and split of the responsibility according to expertise.

At the end of the day, it may be incumbent on the molecular diagnostic community to shape the paradigm for evidence requirements so that payers can act as enablers, rather than watchdogs.

Putting the Pieces Together for Personalized Medicine

At the Personalized Medicine Coalition, our goal is to open the path to innovation in the science and practice of personalized medicine. “Personalized medicine” is the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. For personalized medicine to work, many pieces must align, including detailed knowledge of the genomics underlying a given disease, effective targeted treatments, and accompanying diagnostic tests to identify the patients who are most likely to benefit.

Those pieces do not line up overnight but, instead, each aspect advances as knowledge builds cumulatively over time. For example, the technology to sequence genes has come a long way in the last 15 years. According to our latest edition of The Case for Personalized Medicine, the cost of sequencing the human genome dropped from $300 million in 2001 to $5,000 in late 2011. This dramatic price drop reflects the evolving science that built over time. Without the initial $1 billion investment to sequence the human genome by public and private partners, this progress would not have been possible.

Likewise, we see the same accumulation of knowledge related to personalized treatments over time. Even within one medicine, our understanding of its potential benefits and indications evolves.

Today, we can sub-classify certain diseases based on genetics: Melanoma can be BRAF positive or non-small cell lung cancer can be EGFR positive or ALK positive. Making these distinctions has led to targeting these gene mutations with specific treatments, leading to improvements in patient outcomes and quality of life. Tomorrow, our scientific knowledge base will continue to grow and is coupled with the technological advances that are enabling the analysis and interpretation of findings like no other time in history.

Increasingly, our expanding knowledge of the role of genetic variation in patient response to treatments will drive continuous learning about the optimal role and value of treatment regimens and diagnostic/treatment combinations. This emerging capability holds great potential to improve patient care and healthcare value, but it is at odds with our conventional approaches to assessing value at a point in time based on broad average study results.

To foster continued progress, the private and public sectors must work together to develop policies that align with scientific advances. We need adequate reimbursement for advanced diagnostics and targeted therapies, and flexible methods to access the value of personalized medicines, rather than one-size-fits-all determinations that don’t take the individual into account. We need policies that recognize the many factors that come into play to make personalized medicine possible, including the research, development, and performance of molecular testing.

At the Personalized Medicine Coalition, we firmly believe that we can and must bring personalized medicine to all patients. Collaboration among the many stakeholders involved will move us closer to this goal.

- A version of this blog originally appeared in The Catalyst series highlighting incremental innovation posted at the PhRMA website.

Randy Scott: Bringing Metcalfe’s Law to Genomic Medicine

Each year, the Personalized Medicine Coalition recognizes an individual whose contributions in science, business, and/or policy have helped advance the frontiers of personalized medicine. This year, the Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award was presented to Randy Scott, Ph.D., during the Harvard Personalized Medicine Conference on November 28, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Receiving the 2012 Leadership in Personalized Medicine Award from the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC), Randy Scott reflected on his success as the founder and former CEO of Genomic Health, but also looked ahead to new opportunities with his latest venture, InVitae Corporation.

Scott received the award this week at the 8th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference at Harvard Medical School. “Randy has transformed our understanding of how medicine can be practiced by creating one of the most successful personalized medicine companies to date,” stated Brook Byers, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a previous honoree. Past winners of the PMC Award include Janet Woodcock (FDA), Elizabeth Nabel (NIH), Ralph Synderman (Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University), and Leroy Hood (Institute for Systems Biology).

After a successful stint at Incyte, Scott founded Genomic Health in 2000 and led the firm for nine years, overseeing the development of the Oncotype Dx gene expression test for breast cancer. He modestly shared the credit with numerous colleagues. “My contribution was I probably did a good job of hiring a lot of people at Genomic Health who are way smarter than I was,” he said, naming in particular co-founder Joffre Baker, CMO Steven Shak, and CEO Kim Popovits.

As a graduate student in the early 1980s, Scott said he had been excited about biotech but worried he was too late. “All the exciting genes had been cloned! TPA, Factor VIII, human growth hormone, insulin,” he recalled thinking. Today, Scott said, “we’re on the precipice of incredible accelerating change in this field… Everything we’ve experienced to date pales in comparison to what we’re going to experience in the next 5-10 years.”

But he also shed some personal insight into the launch of his latest venture, InVitae Corporation. He said he is “unabashedly excited” about the future of personalized medicine. “Personalized medicine is really when disease happens to you—your friends or your family. Suddenly it’s no longer just an industry we’re working in but something so personal, so intense, and so emotional. We should never forget that.”

The Network Effect

Scott said reading Intel founder Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive in the mid-90s, during his tenure at Incyte racing to identify human genes, was highly influential. In the book, Grove discussed the impact of Moore’s Law on the revolution in computing; Scott saw parallels with the biotech industry. “The way we were sequencing DNA [at the time] was so embarrassingly simple,” he said. Just as computing costs were plummeting, Scott reasoned it was inevitable that sequencing costs would also fall.

Perhaps more importantly was the concept of “the network effect.” Just as Metcalfe’s Law—the community value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users—drove change in the computing world, so too will it drive the future of biotechnology.

“Having a really cheap genome sequenced is really not very useful. We still see articles in The New York Times, ten years after the genome project, [saying] ‘so what?’ At some level, they’re horribly wrong, and at some level, they’re horribly right. We’ve not yet seen the network effect or the full implication of Moore’s Law.”

Scott said the community is still “1-2 years away from the inflection point” where the cost of sequencing reaches the point that will trigger “massive consumer demand.” The value of genome sequencing will be most strongly felt in the network effect. “How we connect that genomic information across millions and millions of individuals… Somebody can be sitting at a computer, link into the network, and find how a mutation and how it correlates with their patient and a patient somewhere else in the world.”

Scott said he was also a believer in what he called the “Law of Finite Genomes.” The human genome is like a complex finite puzzle with about 150,000 pieces (20,000 genes and 100,000 non-coding RNAs). “All common diseases are really rare diseases,” Scott said, with cancer a prime example. “Medicine goes from an infinite game to a finite game,” he said. By comparing lots of genomic information, we can begin to rule things out.

Patients, Patients, Patients 

Scott was inspired to launch Genomic Health when a close friend was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999. For the first time, Scott was personally struck by the chasm between science/technology and medicine. “We’ve got to bridge the gap—bring the science into clinical practice,” he said.

The focus at Genomic Health, Scott said, was “patients, patients, patients.”

“I’m not sure we had a model other than this maniacal focus on patients that wouldn’t be denied,” he said. If we could really do the science right, the science would sell.” Genomic Health spent an enormous effort on clinical studies.

“Clinical data wins over physicians, and it is physicians that win over the payors,” Scott said. “The onus is on us as an industry to build the value proposition [for payors]… so physicians have to adopt those products. If physicians adopt, they will drive payers to cover.”

Scott left Genomic Health this year to launch InVitae, spurred by the impact of rare genetic diseases affecting members of his family.

In 2000, Scott’s nephew had a daughter with galactosemia. Fortunately, the disorder was diagnosed within 48 hours of birth, and her diet could be changed, otherwise there could have been “a dramatically different outcome.” In 2005, an adopted nephew collapsed on a tennis court and died from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Advanced screening could have saved his life, but nobody knew any family history of cardiac disease, he said.

Finally, one of his wife’s relatives had a young son who developed serious seizures at age 2 years. The infant is developmentally impaired and severely autistic. Earlier this year, Scott revealed that exome sequencing of the child and his parents revealed a single de novo point mutation as the putative cause of the disorder. This is unlikely to provide any tangible medical benefit, but “it gives a clue into potential causes of these disorders,” he said.

Ridiculous Goal 

Scott said his goal in launching InVitae was to bring the power of genetics into the real world of clinical practice. “We have a ridiculous goal,” he said. “We want to aggregate all of the world’s genetic tests into a single assay—for less than the cost of a single assay today!”

In other words, InVitae plans to collapse all Mendelian inherited traits into a single assay that can be performed “reproducibly, at high quality and at reasonable cost for the medical system. So instead of going into these diagnostic odysseys… every parent thinking about conceiving a child can know exactly what their carrier status is and what disease risks lie in their family.”

The initial assay will essentially be an elaborate gene panel, but Scott’s plan is eventually that this will lead into whole-genome sequencing (WGS). Scott believes that “within 10-20 years, everyone in any developed health care system will be able to be provided with a low-cost [WGS] analysis at birth… We’ll be talking about managing your genome over the course of your lifetime.”

As for the question of how to deal with the plethora of data, “that’s Metcalfe’s Law, the network effect,” said Scott. “Much of the data won’t be of value to the patient or physician ordering the test. But collectively, they will be massively valuable to the research community.”

We’re big fans of “Free the Data!” said Scott. The universe of clinical genetic data “won’t be a database held by one company or one academic institution, but you’ll see a massive movement over the course of the next decade to make data broadly available within the research community.” This will create a huge disruption in medicine, Scott predicted, a shift from phenotypically driven medicine to more of a genotype foundation as sequencing costs fall and the network builds.

“Everything will drive off the genotype and it will move very fast,” he said. “This is a given. To me, this is the investment thesis. This will be the place to be, the chance to help people suffering from rare diseases. At the end of the day, every disease is rare.”

InVitae is building a strong management team. The company recently merged with Locus Development, a start-up co-founded by Sean George and Michele Cargill, founding scientists at Navigenics. Steve Lincoln and Jill Hagenkord, both formerly with Complete Genomics, also joined the cause this year, as did Reece Hart, former manager of research computing and informatics at Genentech.

- This article was first published at the Bio·IT World website on November 30, 2012.

Sustaining Progress in Personalized Medicine

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the Harvard Personalized Medicine Conference in Boston, MA. No other conference on personalized medicine brings together the array of scientists, stakeholders, and experts that this event does. This year the conference drove home to me that the potential to improve patient care via personalized medicine is greater than ever – yet the scientific and clinical challenges remain daunting. It is more important than ever to sustain biomedical innovation, and to ensure that health policy is informed by the enormous opportunity, and complexity, of making continued progress in this field.

The event also underscored that biopharmaceutical research companies are deeply committed to advancing the science of personalized medicine and building it into their research and development strategies. It affirms findings of a report released by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in 2010 which found that 94% of biopharmaceutical companies surveyed are investing in personalized medicine and 100% are using biomarkers in the discovery stage to learn about compounds. This research has required large up-front investments in new research tools and training. But, as we have seen in the last year-and-a-half with FDA approval of new targeted therapies for lung cancer, melanoma, and cystic fibrosis, it is starting to bear fruit for patients.

I’m hopeful we’ll see more approvals in the months ahead. In the report from Tufts, companies reported that 12-50% of compounds being researched are personalized medicines and over the last five years, they have seen a roughly 75% increase in their investment in personalized medicines. The importance of personalized medicine was illustrated in the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which provides FDA with increased resources and staffing to advance the regulatory science in areas such as pharmacogenomics and biomarkers.

This progress, however, doesn’t happen in isolation. The Harvard Conference participants represented, and illustrated, the wide range of organizations and individuals from different sectors that make up the research ecosystem that drives progress in personalized medicine. As the science of personalized medicine advances, research partnerships and collaborations will be more important than ever. To sustain progress in personalized medicine, it is vitally important to ensure that policy and regulation do not erect barriers to these types of partnerships.

Biomedical innovations like personalized medicine will help address major unmet medical needs, and offer a solution to rising healthcare costs.  As we face continued pressure to contain healthcare costs, it is crucial to ensure that healthcare policy sustains the innovation ecosystem and incentivizes continued progress in personalized medicine.

Harvard Personalized Medicine Conference Showcases Progress in the Field

Great themes emerged at the Harvard Personalized Medicine Conference last week. This is the third year that I’ve attended and there’s a palpable sense of progress. Examples abound on how precise molecular profiling tools are now being used in clinical practice and the potential going forward is huge.

But this transformation is causing a number of new considerations to come into focus. Working in industry, we have to think about what do these opportunities mean for business? Where can we best add value; what parts of medicine are currently underserved? How can we bring industrial and operational strengths to the emerging new paradigm? And how is the regulatory environment likely to change…for therapies and for diagnostics?

The opportunities and the challenges are breathtaking. Contributors spoke of the opportunity for sequencing data integration into the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and the subsequent effect on medical decision making. And, the emerging Personalized Medicine paradigm should provide opportunity for the sector to make the case of the value of innovation, both clinical and economic. But what will people make of a new generation of EMRs containing contextual individual information across a continuum of patient care…from predisposition, through screening, diagnosis to therapy selection and monitoring.

The audience-sourced data demonstrated how peoples’ acceptance of precision medicine has increased over the years in which the conference has been held. And although oncology still dominates, pharma representatives described case studies in cystic fibrosis and cardiology. Those same pharma contributors acknowledged the absolute necessity for powerful diagnostics to complement the delivery of personalized medicine.

On the first day of the conference, I moderated a session entitled: “Business Models for Genetic Information.” Thought leaders from Siemens, PerkinElmer and Oracle described their companies’ visions for the molecular and digital age.

We had interesting audience feedback. Over 50% of the respondents felt that DNA sequence will become a routine part of an individual’s medical record within the next 10 years. Also interesting was the fact that only about 10% felt that availability of science or technology was the biggest obstacle to the adoption of personalized medicine in the clinic.

We discussed how personalized medicine can become mainstream. This isn’t about enabling personalized medicine for the few, but using technology and scale to deliver to the many. Doing this right not only will benefit patients, but input at the conference from regulators, drug manufacturers, and payors, told us there are a lot of parties interested in the success of this new paradigm. 

Making sense of all this data is a real challenge – how to format; how to integrate? Some contributors spoke of a data-driven industry transformation as has happened in other industries – financial services, retail, and communications. The result has been efficiency and transparency and the appearance of new interested parties – such as those capable of integrating workflow and data. 

The need for workflow integration will continue to be important as well. There are many players out there making individual contributions – from platforms, to molecular markers, to infrastructure, ordering, fulfillment, billing, and reimbursement. But who should take on the task of integration – which is surely needed if the benefits and efficiencies of personalized medicine are to be realized?

Personalized Medicine Is Waiting on the Shelf

While there’s a tendency to paint the future of personalized medicine as sunny, there are a number of issues persistently clouding the horizon. Bob Langreth and I examine one of these concerns in a story you can read at Bloomberg entitled, “Life-Saving DNA Test Overlooked in Rise of Colon Cancer.” Provider education has long stood in the way of patient access to genetic tests for Lynch syndrome, an inherited cause of high cancer risk. While the testing has been available for more than 10 years, enjoys recommendations from clinical and public health groups, and has been shown to save lives in studies, many providers remain unaware of its availability and power. The test costs as little as $300 in families where the mutation has already been identified. People who test positive can take preventive action with frequent monitoring, perhaps having vulnerable tissue removed.  Yet in too many cases it remains on the shelf.

How are we going to get the benefit of full genomes when simple, straightforward tests like this go unused?

John Lauerman will be participating in the panel discussion, “Impact of Genome Sequencing and Health,” at Harvard’s 8th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference, November 28-29, 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Less May Be More

Personalized Medicine has come to be strongly associated with drug-diagnostic combinations (companion diagnostics).  While this is a very important aspect of personalized medicine, it is not the goal.  The goal of personalized medicine is to find the best possible care for each individual patient so as to maximize the likelihood of the individual achieving his/her personal life goals.  While this may seem obvious, this principle has become increasingly harder to identify in every day medical care.

A variety of different motivations has encouraged the healthcare enterprise to view illnesses, or even everyday complaints as the opportunity – if not obligation – to do something for the patient.  The better approach is to ask: What is the best thing one can do for a patient, including the possibility of doing nothing?

As we develop better drug-diagnostic combinations, this will become increasingly apparent.  Soon we will have the ability (through use of precise molecular diagnostics) to know with reasonable certainty whether there is little or no benefit for a particular individual to pursue a therapy which had historically been the standard of care.

But, are we truly ready to forgo a potential therapy even if such a decision is based on strong scientific data?  Or, will we continue to use a therapy on the off chance it might work?  Our desire to do something has to include the possibility that the best treatment might be no therapy, based on the risks to the patient, the likely benefits, and the life goals of the individual.  In the end, patients want their healthcare providers to help them make the best choice and personalized medicine can be a strong tool to do that.  This will provide the largest benefit for patients as they avoid the risks that come with all therapies when no benefit is realistically to be had.

Dr. Stephen Eck will be moderating a panel discussion on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at the 8th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.  Join the discussion at #PMConf. 

Do Not Stymie Innovation by Denying Reimbursement

Last week the public comment period closed for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed payment determination for Multianalyte Assays with Algorithmic Analyses (MAAAs) in the CY 2013 New and Reconsidered Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule (CLFS) Test Codes and Preliminary Payment Determinations (“the Preliminary Determination”).

MAAAs are procedures that utilize multiple results derived from assays of various types. The American Medical Association gives the following definition: “Algorithmic analysis, using the results of these assays as well as other patient information (if used), is then performed and reported typically as a numeric score(s) or as a probability. MAAAs are typically unique to a single clinical laboratory or manufacturer. The results of individual component procedure(s) that are inputs to the MAAAs may be provided on the associated laboratory report; however these assays are not reported separately using additional codes.”

MAAAs are not new.  CMS and private payers routinely pay for them and many of them, having been added to clinical care guidelines, are now considered standard of care.

The proposal, as it stands, will likely prevent providers from receiving reimbursement for MAAAs. Without a clear reimbursement pathway, we risk stifling innovation by sending a powerful message to developers and providers that they cannot recoup investments made in the development, clinical validation, and commercialization of innovative diagnostic products.

Innovators focused on developing new therapies and accompanying diagnostics have difficult decisions to make regarding what products to invest in and bring to market. They must have confidence that future innovative diagnostics will be recognized and valued or improvements in patient care could be at risk.

At the urging of our members, the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) sent a letter to CMS on this issue, noting that the Preliminary Determination:

• Reverses current practice as many of the MAAAs are well-established tests that have been covered and reimbursed by Medicare for several years and are medically necessary given their status as the standard of care in treatment guidelines;
• Jeopardizes personalized medicine and medical innovation by not separately recognizing and valuing the MAAA CPT codes; and
• Represents a lack of transparency in the CMS decision-making process.

PMC recommended that the Preliminary Determination be altered to take into consideration these perspectives, shared by all PMC member organizations, to ensure that the decision does not inadvertently impact current patient care and the future of biomedical innovation.

Healthcare delivery and our research enterprise continue to change as innovators apply new scientific discoveries to the development of new therapies to treat and manage illnesses.  Our reimbursement policies must also adjust in step in order to support our evolving healthcare system.

Today, physicians across the country use sophisticated diagnostics to guide treatment decisions, a trend that we expect will continue. The rise in personalized medicine will lead to efficiencies in the healthcare system that increase the quality of patient care while saving patients exposure to unnecessary treatments that may not help them. Let us not halt innovation in healthcare by hasty policy decisions, such as the Preliminary Determination, that are not fully vetted for unintended consequences.

From The Catalyst (blog) – A Conversation with Marcia Kean, Chairman, Feinstein Kean Healthcare

This entry is reposted with permission from PhRMA’s blog, The Catalyst.

ASCO’s Annual Meeting this week highlighted some of the exciting advances that are emerging in the fight against cancer. PhRMA has joined with many other organizations in supporting a conference next week, “Turning the Tide Against Cancer Through Sustained Medical Innovation,” which is focused on the critical issue of how we sustain this progress in an era of increasing cost-cutting pressure. Conference participants will examine how we measure the value of new treatments and how we can promote high quality, patient-centered care.

The conference is being convened by the American Association of Cancer Research, the Personalized Medicine Coalition, and Feinstein Kean Healthcare. We sat down with each of the conference co-hosts about the event and progress in cancer care.

Conversation with Marcia Kean, Chairman, Feinstein Kean Healthcare

Q:  In the course of 30+ interviews of national thought leaders that you conducted to develop a Discussion Paper for the Turn the Tide conference, what themes emerged most strongly? 

Marcia Kean:  I was very surprised at how much consensus there was from such a disparate group of stakeholders from academe, patient advocacy, industry, providers and payers.  There was strong agreement, for example, that as daunting as cancer is, innovation is going to be the best way to overcome both the clinical and economic burden of cancer in coming years, and that above all, innovation has to be protected.

Five major themes recurred.  The first was around the need for an ongoing, community-wide commitment to overcome the issues we face as a society in oncology.  I don’t mean that everyone had the same perspective about those issues – remember, this was a very diverse set of individuals – but rather, there was agreement that we have the opportunity at this moment to do things differently to accelerate research and improve care, and that in order to reward innovation, it’s important for stakeholders to identify overlapping interests rather than remaining rigid in their safe and separate silos.  Creating a joint, defined vision of what constitutes value will help to outline a pathway for development.

Second, while everyone recognizes that we’ve made progress toward patient-centered cancer care, much more needs to be done. We need a better system for measuring value that puts patients’ needs and preferences first, and keeps up with the rapidly evolving scientific and clinical environment. As personalized medicine becomes more central, of course, this kind of dynamic measurement will only become more difficult.

Third, there’s huge excitement about the potentially positive impact of digital technologies to accomplish the dramatic productivity gains in cancer research and care that they’ve done for other fields.  Developing effective tools for shared decision-making and clinical decision support is seen as a major opportunity in that regard.

Fourth, there’s a desire to move to “next-generation” tools for assessing value through Health Technology Assessment, as well as a fervent desire to develop next-generation Comparative Effectiveness Research that aligns with personalized medicine and gives a fuller picture of real-world value. We heard that current approaches aren’t centered enough on patient value, and don’t do an adequate of job keeping pace with how the use and value of tests and treatments evolves over time – they are just too static in a highly dynamic world.

Finally, there’s a strong drumbeat about the shift to models of “continuous learning” that give a more dynamic, patient-centered picture of value, so that every clinical encounter informs our overall knowledge base and research advances are moved rapidly into clinical use.  That virtuous circle is seen as the light on the horizon for all of us.

Q:  Your firm has been very active in efforts to implement health information technology and develop a learning health care system. How will these concepts accelerate progress in cancer care?

Marcia Kean:  In some ways, the field of biomedicine has been the last to benefit from the digital revolution.  For many cultural – and technical – reasons, we just haven’t been able to move data rapidly from lab bench to doctor’s office to hospital to patient, and so on.  But there is a growing cadre of researchers and clinicians and patients who are demanding the kind of ‘data liquidity’ in science and health care that they see in every other sector of their lives, and they are gaining traction.  Once we have seamless data exchange, based on the use of standards in Health Information Technology and bioinformatics tools, we’ll have a solid foundation for a learning health care system. In that picture, everyone wins:  innovators can accelerate and improve research; patients and doctors can get the information they need to make wise decisions; and the efficiency of the process can drive down costs.

However, we need to remember that even a digitally-enabled system doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it has to unfold in a community where every sector is interconnected and working towards a common, patient-centered vision, because all these challenges and solutions are inter-related in a very complex and dynamic ecosystem.

Adriana Jenkins and the Case for Personalized Medicine

Adriana Jenkins passed away on February 9, 2011 after battling breast cancer. Known for her tenacious advocacy on behalf of targeted therapies, Kelly Lindenboom, honored her passionate work within the personalized medicine community at the Boston Reception hosted by the Personalized Medicine Coalition on November 8, 2011.

Adriana Jenkins had an intoxicating personality and lived every day to the fullest — until, earlier this year, when she died from a rare form of breast cancer at age 41. Adriana was in the prime of her life — she had a thriving career in biotech public relations, was an incredible artist and had an extensive network of friends, that to Adriana, were her family. I’m part of her family.

At age 32, Adriana was engaged to be married, getting ready to start a new job with an up-and-coming biotechnology company and excited for what was to be the best time of her life. And then came the phone call from her doctor that changed everything. With a diagnosis of stage 3B inflammatory breast cancer — a rare, aggressive form of the disease — she had limited options to consider.

With less than a 50 percent chance of survival beyond five years, Adriana was desperate to explore any and all options that might give her better odds. Unlike the majority of people who are diagnosed with cancer every year, Adriana possessed a unique and intimate understanding of the pharmaceutical industry and was able to be her own best advocate after her diagnosis. When a colleague suggested she look into an investigational therapy — Herceptin — being tested locally at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, she jumped at the chance. And as it turned out, she was a perfect fit for the trial and was enrolled in the study.

While the clinical trial was not always easy, Adriana responded wonderfully to the Herceptin, which was eventually approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is used today to treat many women with the same type of genetic marker, HER2, that was present in Adriana’s cancer.

Because of her success with Herceptin, one of the first so-called personalized medicines to be approved for use, Adriana was able to beat the odds. Really beat the odds. She credited personalized medicine treatment for giving her the nearly 10 years she was told she wouldn’t have. And she was thankful for every day that she had.

Unfortunately, despite encouraging results, personalized medicine is still a rarity in most cancer treatments. In her article “A Dying Wish,” published in Forbes magazine, written shortly before her death, Adriana made an eloquent appeal for the broad adoption of personalized medicines for cancer and other diseases based on her own incredible, nearly decade-long fight with breast cancer. In the article, she posed a question related to personalized medicine:

How do we convince drugmakers to focus their shrinking R&D budgets on this area of scientific discovery?

And then offered this potential challenge to our nation’s pharmaceutical companies and lawmakers:

“One idea is to create an incentive for drugmakers comparable to that in the Orphan Drug Act. Passed in 1983, it encourages companies to develop drugs for diseases that have a small market (fewer than 200,000 patients in the U.S.). Under the law, companies that develop such a drug may sell it without competition for seven years, in addition to often receiving quicker “fast track” regulatory review… A comparable law could push drugmakers to develop PM drugs for cancer and other deadly ailments.”

At the end of the article she offered this plea:

I urge patients, physicians and insurers to create a similar group to support the commercialization of personalized cancer drugs.

After her diagnosis with cancer, Adriana had the word “hope” tattooed onto the inside of her wrist as a constant reminder to herself for how she wanted to embrace life.

In the years that followed her remission, Adriana remained a strong advocate for the potential of personalized medicine, putting her public relations know-how to work by partnering with Herceptin’s developers to share her experience with the media and bring awareness to other women receiving a new cancer diagnosis.

The week that Adriana passed away, her article about the power and potential of personalized medicine was published in Forbes. And today, her friends are supporting her vision — keeping her “hope” alive — through the Adriana Jenkins Foundation for Personalized Medicine and a fundraising team with Stand Up To Cancer. Formed in Adriana’s name, the goal of the group is to raise awareness and be a proponent for development of personalized medicines, like the one that gave Adriana the nearly 10 years she never expected she would have.

Cancer is an extraordinarily complicated problem, and will only be solved through new approaches and ideas. Personalized medicine is one of them.

- These remarks were first made by Ms. Lindenboom at the Personalized Medicine Coalition Boston Reception on November 8, 2011. They were also posted on HuffingtonPost.com.