Expanding precision medicine beyond cancer

Koustubh Ranade, a geneticist and vice president of R&D at MedImmune in Gaithersburg, US, talks to business editor Phillip Broadwith about the future of presonalised, or precision, medicine.

The concept of ‘precision medicine’ is growing in popularity in the pharmaceutical industry. The idea is simple: develop highly targeted drugs and sophisticated diagnostic tests that can accurately identify subtypes of complex diseases and determine which of a range of drugs should be most effective.

‘The science that has emerged over the last decade or so clearly suggests that what we think of as lung cancer, for example, is actually driven by many molecular pathways – so it stands to reason that treating all patients with the same chemotherapy agent is unlikely to work,’ he says. ‘And that’s what we see: when we identify a patient with a particular molecular feature, and then tailor the treatment to target that feature, the outcomes are much, much better.’