Biotechnica 2013 Only for You: The Future Trend Personalized Medicine

The potential of increasing individualisation in diagnostics and therapy of illnesses is undoubted. What is already possible today? And where do the urgent questions and challenges lie? The marketplace “Personalized Medicine Technologies” in Hall 9 seeks to come to grips with these questions on three days of the Fair.

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“If one asks five persons for a definition of the term ‘personalized medicine‘, one is certain to receive ten different answers,” said Dr. Sabine Sydow, vfa bio, in her introduction to her lecture as part of the opening event for the market place “Personalized Medicine Technologies” at this year's Biotechnica.

And, indeed, a comprehensive and simultaneously concise definition is no trivial matter, for this thematic area is highly complex. Often, however, personalized medicine is equated with the term ‘stratified’ medicine. It intends to enable efficient diagnostics and therapy of the individual illness, while, at the same time, leading to minimised side-effects and more strongly preventive and predicative medicine, and also making the health system more efficient. Even today, according to vfa, around 30 medicines are in “personalized” use.

Therapeutic vs. Regulatory Complecity

Simultaneously opportunity and challenge In the complexity mentioned above, Dr. Rainer Wessel, of Leading-Edge Cluster, sees at the same time one of the essential challenges of this approach. “Here we have on the one hand the diagnostic and therapeutic complexity, but on the other the regulatory and political complexity”.

For this, new networks are necessary, which, at the same time, presents structural demands, for example on the availability of bio-banks, the conducting of clinical studies and on data management, as well as on training and skill development and also innovation transfer.

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