CLIA? Glad to see ya.

There’s so much going on at the BIO convention. It’s a healthcare policy feast.

One panel I attended was on the future of personalized medicine via diagnostics. A few of the points made were:

• At present, “trial and error medicine” is the standard of care. Not good for providers, patients, nor payers. That’s true.

• What we today call “personalized medicine” will be referred to in the near future as “medicine.” That’s hopeful.

• Diagnostics will deliver personalized care via drug selection, dosing, efficacy, disease status, recurrence risk, and predisposition. That’s exciting.

• Diagnostics lead the league in the price/value proposition – and that’s what will initially drive uptake. That’s reality.

• To that point, there was also discussion of a diagnostics acceptance continuum beginning with “fear” and then moving to “value” and finally “acceptance.”

• And the constituencies moving along that path include pharmaceutical companies, physicians, patients, payers – and regulators.

• Specifically, to more expeditiously sashay down the Critical Path, the diagnostics industry needs industry-wide guidelines for clinical research.

Take-away is that "personalized" medicine is 21st century medicine. And that's a "win" for physicians, payers ... and even patients. As BIO Chairman (and Vertex CEO) Dr. Joshua Boger commented at the opening day's keynote, we must all be "a confederation of optimists."