The economics of personalized medicine: commercialization as a driver of return on investment

Optimizing commercialization of drugs is the sine qua non of the pharmaceutical industry and intensive work has been done to characterize fully the drivers of drug adoption and understand the resources required to optimize those drivers for full adoption of drugs. Conversely, while the pharmaceutical industry is actively embracing the new personalized medicine (PM) paradigm, much work remains to be done to understand fully what drives adoption of targeted therapies and how to resource those drivers appropriately. While the industry is slowly learning from its early missteps, progress is still inhibited by a lack of understanding of the specific hurdles that individual development teams face in developing and commercializing targeted therapies and the requirement for budgets specifically aimed at driving test adoption. This article considers the benefits of optimizing commercial planning in the PM space and the potential negative impact in potentially failing to optimize that planning. Real world insights are used to illustrate that a far broader commercial lens is required in the PM space and will touch on functional areas not usually included in the context of ‘commercial’ decisions.