Angelina Jolie Lends Her Voice and Experience to Personalized Medicine

It was great to see Angelina Jolie’s eloquent op-ed in the May 14 edition of The New York Times. She carefully wove her personal experience with the importance of genetic testing and using the resulting information to make an informed health decision. I applaud her decision to go public with her story as a great example of patient empowerment but also as a powerful example of personalized medicine in action.

Despite all the advances we have made in recent years, we all know that the concept of personalized medicine is still foreign to most Americans. PMC recently conducted focus groups which strongly reminded us of the uphill battle that remains to gain public understanding of and support for personalized medicine. In our groups only one or two out of 52 participants were able to correctly describe the concept.

We found that people are very enthusiastic about personalized medicine once they understand it but it is a complex concept which is often misunderstood. It turns out that giving clear, specific examples of personalized diagnostics and treatments is the best way to explain what personalized medicine is and the benefits it can bring.

Ms. Jolie’s contribution demonstrates that without patients who are educated, empowered to get tested and to act, the progress and innovation could be for naught. We need to make sure that patients are knowledgeable enough to pursue personalized options for their own health but also so that they are motivated to support policies that foster continued progress in this area.

Angelina Jolie’s op-ed is an important and high-profile contribution to the discourse about patient experience and personalized medicine.  Her voice echoes the words of Adriana Jenkins, who courageously shared her battle against breast cancer and joins other advocates like Donna Cryer, who works tirelessly to remind all stakeholders about how personalize medicine is a patient-centric approach to healthcare. Courageous individuals, like Ms. Jolie, who publicly share their personal stories have the power to bolster both public and media discourse around patient empowerment, for example with CNN “Early Start” co-anchor Zoraida Sambolin’s disclosure of her own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment decision live on air.

I hope that Ms. Jolie’s op-ed raises awareness of personalized medicine and the options patients have to take control of their healthcare.  No single organization alone can raise public awareness on the scale that we need but through a steady stream of individual op-eds, blog posts, conversations, etc., we in the personalized medicine community can spotlight more stories like this and begin to educate the public.  I look forward to hearing more voices from the community and hope that their contributions will support personalized medicine research, patient and provider engagement, and thoughtful policy.

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.