Episode 019 | July 4, 2022 | 12:45
Guest: —
Published: July 4, 2022
Duration: 12:45
Description
In today s episode, Lasse, Senior Consultant in Green Innovation Group, is back with us and talking about the art of precision medicine. What it is, how it can help the healthcare sector and why it matters from a sustainability perspective.
Full transcript
About this transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies, typos, or mistranslations. Episodes recorded before 2024 were transcribed by an on-site model and may have a higher error rate. The content reflects the original conversation to the best of our ability. For the authoritative version, please listen to the audio episode.
I remember someone saying that giving an example of somebody having an issue in the brain and that it was given a pill with an active ingredient and the analogy was that it was a bit like opening up the hood of your car and you know there is an issue so you put a motor all over the engine and you hope that some of it sticks in the right places. Precision medicine or personalized treatment is healthcare solutions targeted at individuals or in some cases smaller groups rather than population based. Welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast, a podcast where we talk about sustainability in pharma, medtech and healthcare services with tips and tricks on how you can get there. And today we have Lasse in the studio, one of our senior consultants where he will take us through the 101 on precision medicine and how that can help with sustainability in the healthcare system. Hi Lasse, welcome back to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Thank you. You are a senior consultant with us here at the Green and Raging Group and we are very lucky to have you working on our projects to make the healthcare sector more sustainable.
And I’m quite excited about today’s topic. It’s a bit futuristic but in a not-so-far-distance future we are going to talk about precision medicine and personalized treatment and what are some of the sustainability potentials in this area. It’s going to be a 101 introduction to get people started. So what is personalized treatment or precision medicine? Yeah, so first of all, thanks for having me, happy to be here. We use these two terms interchangeably. At this point the concept has not been, there’s not a consensus in the global society around which word to use, so we use both words interchangeably. precision medicine or personalized treatment is healthcare solutions targeted at individuals or in some cases smaller groups rather than population-based.
That seems very nifty. Get something that stares for me than for everybody. What’s the difference between that and the way we are developing medicine today? So you can describe personalized treatments as operating by a core tenant, which is we are seeking the minimum intervention necessary to address our health concern. And I know that many companies and hospitals operate by this already, but it is especially important in this case because it signifies that we want to make sure that we give you the medicine, the active ingredient or the treatment that you specifically need, but no more than that. We just need the minimum effective dose for you to get better. So it’s a way of kind of making the window more narrow and to say instead of we know what’s good for the majority of people in this setting, so we’re going to give you that dosage.
We try to figure out what is exactly for you, what is going to do the trick here, what is going to make you better. So we take into account characteristics like genetics, your background environment, your lifestyle and maybe your medical history as well. So it’s taking into account some data points that allow the treatment to be tailored to your specific needs and context. Yeah, and it goes into this that I think for laymen and people with outlawing specialized degrees we have to, we usually think of medicine as very directly causal. I eat this pill, therefore this happens from A to B all the time, all the ways for everybody and the reality is really quite different. A lot of the treatment that we mean, of course the treatment is safe and efficient to a large degree otherwise it wouldn’t have come through FDA and EMA and it should be more efficient than the current other solutions. But still within this we see that a lot of medicine, a lot of treatments will have pretty large parts of the population where it has, doesn’t have an effect or a reduced effect.
Yeah, and this can actually be a natural development just coming from the aging society and the increasing complexity that is needed in our healthcare system, coming from an aging population which will increasingly have more complex illnesses and more comorbidities because the health situation will be more specifically demanding. In those cases just to meet the needs we need more precise treatments. So personalized treatments they are coming to some extent but we can utilize that lever and we can utilize that momentum and actually really leverage it towards increasing the sustainability of the healthcare of the future which is I think really interesting. Why is that important or what is the potential in terms of sustainability? So I don’t exactly remember which medicine was given as the example but I remember someone saying that giving an example of somebody having an issue in the brain and that was giving a pill with an active ingredient and the analogy was that it was a bit like opening up the hood of your car and you know there is an issue so you pour a motor oil all over the engine and you hope that some of it sticks in the right places which it maybe will but it’s not it’s a relatively crude form of intervention that we have to take in a pill and then hopefully a part of the active ingredient will end up in the right places. So what we’re looking to do here is with more precise medicine and more precise treatments we’re looking to minimize the active ingredients that we put into the system and this into the human body and this will benefit of course the patient which only gets the precise ingredients needed and the precise medicine needed it will benefit the environment because a lot of the medicines that we take in and a lot of the products that we use in the healthcare system are then passed on into the environment and into different ways treatment systems which are quite costly and of course it will benefit all the corporations that are developing the solutions as well as the hospitals administering the treatment in that they will have less of a resource burden to deliver this treatment. So we’ll have a resource saving all over the pallets I’d say and we will have an increased quality of treatment as well for the individual.
And will it be a resource saving because intuitively you could also think that if we have to develop treatments for each individual I mean it costs plus one billion dollars to develop an average drug. I mean we can do that for everybody so how do we actually get this precision without having to do a large clinical study just for less which would also be too time-consuming and so on. Of course yeah so it as you say it rightly points out it points out it’s it’s it takes a toll on the development aspect of the treatments and in this case we need a lot more flexibility and we need to utilize the complexity of data that we have available to make this to develop these treatments. So in other words instead of going through the full development process that you would do now to with clinical trials and all the different steps and approval gates that there are let’s find out which part of that drug development needs to go through population level trials of course and which part of that can we specify specific elements of a single treatment that are relevant only to people with this and this genetic or this and this lifestyle or this in this background so we try to make a combination of large scale population-wide clinical trials that kind of secure the basis and most of all make sure that we don’t do anything wrong here and then we try to tailor it combine it with specialized information and personalized data on the individuals. This sounds really complex and also needing a lot of data. I mean it’s a broad question but in rough terms where are we today with precision medicine? Yes I mean as we are relatively early stage I would say in this field so one of the images that come to mind when we talk about the future of personalized treatments is this idea that the pharmacies as we know them today could actually go back to what was there prerogative back in the days you have these images of pharmacists rolling pills literally creating them in the in the pharmacy and then handing it out to people and we don’t see this today because they all have access to a global pool of medical products right but we could actually see down the line I’m not gonna promise that it’s here in 10 or 20 years but to see a type of 3D printing on the spot production on demand for certain kinds of medicines and treatments which I think would be really interesting but we are I think decades away from that even being realistic.
What we see happening though is that we are in the early stage of a process that is happening in the way that of course for all of this to become reality we need a lot of data and we need to compartmentalize and analyze that data in novel ways and that data amount is already ramping up to quite a big extent so what we know is that the growth of data generation in the healthcare system right now as estimated by McKinsey company is around 48% per year so that is an extremely high growth rate of data generated in the healthcare system which in other words means that 90 plus percent of the data that is available in this entire system was generated just in the last 18 months so we can predict that if this growth rate continues we will have extreme amounts of data available for big data analysts and algorithms to sort through and to support the development of these precision production methods and to the to support the development of precision medicine. Amazing so to sum it up what is precision medicine? Precision medicine is the addressing of an individual’s health issue rather than a population scale health issue and what is the sustainability potential in this? The great potential for sustainability in this field is that by reducing the products and the medicines produced and offered and by tailoring the treatment to specific individuals or to small groups we eliminate a lot of the waste we eliminate a lot of the production process and we make sure that we only offer the minimum necessary intervention in a certain case so we save resources in production and we tailor the treatment to the individual and we also save the environment for a lot of the wasted medicines that might otherwise accrue in the system. Excellent thank you so much for this intro Lasse for being back on the podcast always a pleasure. Good to be here. Thanks for listening to the episode.
It was always a pleasure to talk with Lasse. One of the images that really stuck with me was the one where treatment was viewed as opening the hood of a car and just pouring motor oil all over the place and hoping something sticks rather than going in and saying okay we have a problem here and then we need to fix that specific problem and I think that holds a very exciting future for better treatment through precision medicine for all of us.