As PMC celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, I am pleased to share the Coalition’s Strategic Plan for Advancing Personalized Medicine in 2023. The plan arrives at a moment when the contention upon which PMC was founded — that a paradigm shift toward personalized medicine will not occur just because new tests and treatments have become available — is more evident than ever.
PMC research shows, for example, that due to the influence of testing and treatment difficulties occurring at each of seven steps in the precision oncology pathway, personalized medicine benefitted only 36 percent of a cohort of 38,068 advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients diagnosed in 2019. With more than 100,000 genetic testing products and 300 personalized medicines now on the market, we know we can do better than this to help turn the tide against many of humanity’s most dreadful biological foes, including cancers, rare genetic diseases, chronic conditions, and infectious diseases.
In this context, the Coalition’s three-part Strategic Plan explains what PMC aspires to do in 2023 to encourage investment in personalized medicine and help close the gap between what is possible and what is practiced in modern medicine.
To provide a foundation of awareness and understanding that will help make patients, policymakers, payers, and providers more receptive to putting in place public policies and scientific practices designed to broaden patient access to personalized medicine, the plan calls for a robust program of educational outreach, advocacy, and research across multiple disease states.
To help policymakers answer key questions about how to develop, regulate, and pay for paradigm-shifting diagnostics and treatments, the plan commits PMC to advocate for continued investments in biomedical research as well as modernized regulatory, coverage, and payment policies that support access to personalized medicine.
And to help evaluate the clinical and economic potential of personalized medicine, the plan previews three PMC research studies aimed at assessing payers’ perspectives on personalized medicine, documenting improvements in clinical care associated with personalized medicine, and addressing disparities in research advancing personalized medicine.
In the coming weeks and months, we hope you will take the time to share with us your thoughts on the plan, which references initiatives PMC will complete with the continued support of its more than 225 members as well as those that we could undertake with additional sponsorship dollars to support the 17th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference and our 2023 research agenda.
