The Change Mariner

Rise of Personalized Medicine vs. Mass Medicine

Always-On Network

Excert from an Interview with Vinod Khosla, VC at Kleiner Pekins:

... Then, as a category, I've always said personalized medicine is very important. Genomic Health is in that category. The idea being, if you get arthritis, or you get a heart attack, or you get cancer, you get the same treatment as [anyone] does. Nobody really looks at the molecular level of what's going on in your body. And two women may have breast cancer but the gene that sort of went bad, and the molecular level expression of that may be very different. Almost all medicine is mass medicine today. Genomic Health is looking at simple facts -- like there's lots of people who shouldn't take chemotherapy. But right now if you have breast cancer that gets in your lymph nodes, you get chemotherapy. Now if half of them don't need it, why put them through the expense, and the pain?

So you start to look inside at the gene expression profile. And based on that you start making more personalized medicine, as opposed to 'one set of genes fits everybody,' mass medicine. Right now, if you look at any analyst report, the passion in medicine is about 'What's a billion dollar drug? What's the next Viagra, and Lipitor for cholesterol, or Claritin for allergies?' One drug fits all. But everybody's version of diabetes or arthritis is different. So personalized medicine is a big category.