IMPPC Fundación Institut de Medicina Predictiva i Personalitzada del Càncer
Our Project / Faq
The purpose of this introduction is to explain the context the project and the reasons for its creation in this area of Spain and its objectives as a center for pioneering research. For those with further questions about our project, please contact us on info@imppc.org.
Reduction in costs of Treatments while the price of Medication is constantly Rising
Healthcare providers need to apply treatments for the most beneficial length of time and only to those patients who will respond. The cost of prescribing all treatments to all patients on a trial and error basis is unsustainable.
Until recently patients in the UK, Australia and New Zealand with certain types of early breast cancer had to pay up to US70,000 of their own money for a year's treatment with Herceptin. An outcry from well organized patient support groups forced health systems in these countries to provide the drug. In New Zealand the state would only fund a nine-week course with patients having to make up the difference. With such high costs involved for new cancer drugs, health care providers have every reason to require maximum information on who will benefit from the drug, what dosage is required and how long the treatment should be. They also need to minimize the number of treatments tried out to see if a patient responds, something that happens frequently in the one-size-fits-all model.
(For more information see Rachel Nowack, "Cancer Drugs we can all afford". New Scientist 1 Dec 2007)
Even relatively cheap drugs represent a huge cost to healthcare providers if they are widely used. Prescription of these drugs only to patients who will benefit will represent huge savings.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced plans in August 2007 to change the labeling of the anti-clotting drug Warfarin to explain that variations in the two genes CYP2CP and VKORC1 affect the way people metabolize the drug and the doses they need. This is not a niche drug, approximately 2 million people in the USA are put on Warfarin each year and as many as 43,000 emergency room incidents a year are caused by adverse side effects. It is not difficult to work out the advantage of better prescription and better dosage calculation of such a drug. A website called WarfarinDosing.org has been developed by Brian Gage of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis Missouri to calculate dose from a patient's data but researchers agree that more clinical evidence is required.
(For more information see Peter Aldhous, "Why the long wait for Gene Specific Drugs?", New Scientist 28 October 2007)