Sustainability of personalised medicine Authors Oriol de Solà-Morales Pere Virgili Institute for Health Research (IISPV), Tarragona Abstract To achieve sustainability, there is a very basic equation that says that income has to be equal to or greater than expenditure. Despite the financial crisis, that lead expenditure in healthcare to fall sharply since 2010, consumption of healthcare resources continues to grow. The only way to achieve equilibrium is for expenditure on new resources to be balanced by future gains. But can personalised medicine meet this need? At the moment, there is little reason to think that personalised medicine will reduce healthcare costs by reducing drug costs. In a personalised medicine scenario, incomewill, at best, most likely be neutral in the coming years whereas expenditures for diagnostics and prevention will increase and treatment will, at best, have a neutral effect.Keywords: personalised medicine ∙ sustainability ∙ pharmacogenetics ∙ orphan drugs ∙ drug pricing mechanisms Downloads PDF Issue Vol. 8 No. 2 (2012) Section Keynote Lectures License This work is subject, unless the contrary is indicated in the text, the photographs or in other illustrations, to an Attribution —Non-Commercial— No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons License, the full text of which can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work provided that the author is credited and reuse of the material is restricted to non-commercial purposes only and that no derivative works are created from the original material.
