ARTICLE SUMMARY:
The Women’s Brain Foundation is out to demonstrate that sex- and gender-specific precision medicine is not only cost-effective healthcare, it’s also a way to derisk both pharma and device therapy development, and not just for diseases that only affect women.
One-size-fits-all medicine is neither clinically nor cost effective. That’s obvious because there are numerous examples of drugs that work well or have serious adverse effects in some patients but not others, and in diseases like epilepsy, for example, where it can sometimes take years for patients that don’t respond to a first-line medication to eventually get the therapy that frees them from dangerous symptoms. All of this inefficiency pours money down the drain, leads to needless side effects, wasted time that permits disease progression, and opportunity costs.
Precision medicine promises to solve that conundrum. By stratifying populations or testing individuals according to their genetic makeup or other biological markers, then choosing the therapy appropriate for them, early targeted treatment might save money and increase the odds of successful outcomes. For both pharma and device product innovators, such strategies could also reduce product failures and decrease time to market.
