PricewaterhouseCoopers: Personalized medicine market to grow 11% annually

NEW YORK Personalized medicine, which targets individualized treatment and care based on personal and genetic variation, is creating a booming market, but is a disruptive innovation that will create both opportunities and challenges for traditional health care and emerging market participants, according to a new report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report, The Science of Personalized Medicine: Translating the Promise into Practice, projects that the market for a more personalized approach to health and wellness will grow to as much as $452 billion by 2015. PricewaterhouseCoopers' estimates are based on a broad view of the market opportunity beyond drugs and devices to also include demand for high-tech storage and data-sharing as well as low-tech products and services aimed at consumers’ heightened awareness of their own health risks.

“Medical science and technological advancement have converged with the growing emphasis on health, wellness and prevention sweeping the country to push personalized medicine to a tipping point,” said David M. Levy, M.D., global healthcare leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “We are now seeing a blurring of the lines between traditional healthcare offerings and consumer-oriented wellness products and services. The market potential is enormous for any company that learns to leverage the science, target individuals and develop products and services that promote health.”

The promise of personalized medicine has been predicated upon genomic testing, which enables physicians to identify an individual’s susceptibility to disease, predict how a given patient will respond to a particular drug, eliminate unnecessary treatments, reduce the incidence of adverse reactions to drugs, increase the efficacy of treatments and, ultimately, improve health outcomes.

“There is an urgent need to increase the value of health care, but we can’t get there by fixing the health care of yesterday. We need to replace our current focus on treating disease with a better approach that is personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory, the basic tenants of personalized medicine,” said Gerald McDougall, principal in charge of personalized medicine and health sciences, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Greater collaboration around personalized medicine should be a key strategy for health reform.”