While personalized medicine and nanotechnology are still buzzwords rather than significant product generators, both have the potential to produce revolutionary commercial changes, according to scholars and business people who met at Wharton last month to talk about leading-edge industries. Their discussion was part of the Emerging Technologies Update Day sponsored by the Mack Center for Technological Innovation.
Personalized medicine denotes treatments tailored individually to patients. It springs from a growing understanding of genomics and augurs an ability to formulate the precise drug and dosage that every patient needs. Nanotechnology covers anything that can be done at the so-called nanoscale -- between 1 and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. "It's not one technology," says Christine Peterson, vice president for policy and research at the Foresight Nanotech Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's a lot of different technologies. There are nanomaterials, nanodevices and nanosystems."
Personalized medicine is closer than nanotechnology to yielding widespread benefits. Some scientists argue that it arrived, in a limited way, years ago. "Millions of Americans with potential thyroid problems get two tests, and from those tests, we know exactly what medicine they need and what dose to prescribe," says Bob McCormack, vice president for clinical and technical affairs at Veridex, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.
Yet the treatment of many illnesses, and thus many patients, remains a process of trial and error, says Christine Côté, Johnson & Johnson's vice president for emerging technologies and new ventures. "Today, medicine is one size fits all. Diseases and patients are heterogeneous, and therefore treatments need to be individualized. Personalized medicine means the right medicine for the right person at the right time."
People understandably marvel at the pharmaceutical industry's advances.
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