Klaus Lindpaintner

Title: Future of Health Care Industry – Strategies for Personalized Medicine

Throughout the course of its history, medical progress has always been driven by a more differen-tiated understanding of disease biology. Recent advances in science and technology have delivered to us new tools, allowing more fundamental and mechanistic insights into cell biology. This allows us now to also reach a more refined understanding of inter-individual differences in drug response on two levels. On one, such differences are independent of particular disease states, but are related to individual characteristic that affect the body’s processing of xenobiotics. On the other, these dif-ferences are intimately related to disease biology, leading us to what amounts to a “rewriting of the textbook of medicine” based on molecular understanding. Both, in due course, may then allow a shift from todays largely empiric and palliative to a causally targeted and pharmacopoeia, where choice and regimen of administration of a medicine can be tailored in a much more differentiated fashion, providing more effective and safer treatment options. Ultimately, the associated expense to health care systems will need to be justified by demonstration of appropriate clinical utility, in the sense of incremental cost-efficacy. This will require a systematic, staged, and case-specifically adjusted approach for optimal balance of risk-benefit, and sustainable success of the concept.