Diagnostics & co-dependent drug-companion diagnostics technologies: a breakthrough in improving european patient outcomes
The growth in “precision medicines” personalised to individual patients, supported by more precise companion diagnostic technologies, offers the potential to transform existing standards of patient care.
Personalised medicine, built on recent innovations in molecular diagnostics, molecular pathology and digital pathology, hold the key to a more precise understanding of why people respond differently to the same medications. Companion diagnostics will ensure that patient populations are better segmented and selected, potentially transforming how their conditions are predicted, prevented and managed.
Companion diagnostics provide the means to better predict which patients will respond to certain targeted therapies, thereby improving patient outcomes while reducing overall healthcare costs.
- For patients, more personalised disease management ensures that those identified as “not likely to respond” to one specific treatment can be quickly transitioned to other potentially more effective treatments as they become available.
- For health care providers, companion diagnostics make it possible to identify patient populations most likely to benefit from a specific personalised therapy, reducing ineffective treatments to patients while improving safety.
- For national healthcare systems, breakthroughs in co-dependent diagnostic and drug development can help lower overall costs by ensuring the right patients are selected to receive the right treatments while reducing unnecessary interventions that add pressure to already squeezed healthcare budgets and resources.
- For diagnostic companies, greater predictability and consistency in how health authorities fund companion diagnostics tests will ensure continued investment and innovation, and faster access to improved patient treatments.
- For drug makers, breakthroughs in co-dependent diagnostic and drug development has the potential to transform how new drugs are made and commercialized – resulting in safer, more effective treatments arriving to market faster, staying on the market longer, and ensuring greater price stability.
If the promise of personalised medicine is to be realized, appropriate public sector reimbursement practices that acknowledge the important co-dependency between drug development and companion diagnostics must be established to ensure Europeans fully benefit from these breakthrough treatments.