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May 2000

Tomorrow's medicines will be tailor made to your genetic blueprint

Cambridge Consultants' Healthcare Dinner debates the future of molecular medicine

In the future, the decision over which drug to give a patient for a particular illness will be made on the basis of that person's genetic make up.

Researchers are beginning to uncover genetic differences in diseases that indicate which patients will and will not respond to treatments, the leading lights of the UK pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies were told at a recent dinner held by Cambridge Consultants Ltd.

Dr John Stageman, [pictured here (left), with CCL's Dr Brian Moon (right)] keynote speaker at the event and AstraZeneca's vice-president of enabling science and technology, said this understanding would be put to use to develop drugs targeted at genetic variations in diseases.

"It is very clear that many chronic conditions such as asthma and heart disease, are much more complex than we currently understand," he said. "We will discover that there are many genes and variations that will all play a role in creating different sub-types of what we now classify as one disease."

"This understanding would lead to more effective treatment options," he said, "avoiding situations such as occurred in hypertension treatment, where it has been estimated that as many as 40 per cent of patients who are treated do not have their blood pressure will controlled by current therapies."

But this more efficient form of treatment will depend on the development of cheap and fast diagnostics that can determine the genetic variants, suggested the debate on 'Biotechnology and information technology - the key drivers of healthcare in the 21st century'.

The ideal would be to have a test that pinpointed the genetic variations related to a particular disease sub-type, which enabled the doctor to prescribe the appropriate drug. But until the tests were in the region of pennies each this vision would remain in the future, suggested some of those attending the dinner.

Dr Monika Green, manger of CCL's biotechnology consulting team spoke of the challenge of developing such tests. "Developing tests of this sort is going to require companies to be more innovative in how they design and develop appropriate assays. It will need closer co-operation will between pharmaceutical companies and the diagnostic companies. Until then, the prescription of therapeutics will remain sub-optimal."

Over 90 leading individuals from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors and other healthcare groups attended CCL's fourth annual healthcare dinner. The event was held appropriately at Hinxton Hall in Cambridge, just a few hundred yards from the Sanger Research Institute, one of the leading centres in the human genome project.

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