Benefits of Personalised Healthcare
Scientific/Biomarker expert
Dr Shirin Khambata Ford
‘As a researcher strongly committed to driving Personalised Healthcare forward, I appreciate some of the distinct advantages of having both Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics under one roof .’
‘In the field of oncology it is particularly helpful to involve diagnostics as early as possible in clinical development. This increases the efficiency and speed of discovering and developing patient selection markers that could have an actual impact in the clinic, and make an important difference to patients’ lives. In order to do this at a high frequency for our drug candidates across multiple indications, a dedicated in-house diagnostics effort is required, and Roche clearly has one of the largest and strongest in the industry.’
Scientific/Biomarker expert
Dr Shirin Khambata Ford
Medical laboratory
scientist Dr José Gilberto Vieira
scientist Dr José Gilberto Vieira
‘We see tremendous changes in our tasks. With Personalised Healthcare, diagnostic services gain relevance rapidly since our test results become integral factors for the development of modern treatment strategies.’
‘Increasingly, treatment decisions are based on sophisticated laboratory analysis covering complex diseases, cancer for example. Modern diagnostic methods enable us to provide precise data and thus offer a reliable basis for treatment decisions. Rapid initiation of the right therapy and an optimised use of the limited resources of our healthcare system result from this strategy. This is a real win-win situation for patients and for society as a whole.’
Medical laboratory scientist
Dr José Gilberto Vieira
Physician
Dr Caroline Robert
‘It’s a very exciting time for us. We are all aware that we are entering a new era of skin cancer treatment!’
‘Skin cancer was an area of high unmet medical need, but with the new compounds becoming available we are going to improve the survival of our patients. The stratification and targeted treatment of this fatal disease represents a major step forward. As next steps we have to establish screening for the relevant genetic mutations. We also need to learn how best to combine the various compounds, some still in development, in order to maximise impact and benefit for patients.’
Physician
Dr Caroline Robert
Insurance Executive
Prof. Thomas Szucs
‘In my view, Personalised Healthcare will be the only way of husbanding our resources in a way that makes good business sense!’
‘For the insurance companies, Personalised Healthcare is extremely important because in future we will simply not be able to afford to stick to the “one-size-fits-all” method of providing patients with medicines or technologies in a rough-and-ready manner. Professional analyses tell us that both from an economic and from a medical view-point, diagnostics-based, optimised therapy, say for hepatitis C, is superior to standard treatment strategies.’
Insurance Executive
Prof. Thomas Szucs
Patient
Doretha 'Dee' Burrell
‘The option of targeted treatment gave me hope and a better quality of life!’
‘Hearing the words, “you have breast cancer” were the most devastating words I had ever heard. I was so frightened, not sure how life would be for me going forward. It gives me peace to know that my oncologist believed in targeted therapy and I am most grateful to have been administered such a treatment which has improved the quality of my life for the past four years.’
Patient
Doretha 'Dee' Burrell
Investigator
Prof. Henry Lik-Yuen Chan
‘The immediate combination of diagnosis, therapy and monitoring of treatment success in hepatitis B infection is a major step forward. This increases the benefits for our patients enormously!’
‘About 350 million people are infected with the hepatitis B virus; about 75 percent of these people are living in Asia. By predicting better and earlier who is going to respond to therapy allows us to provide more effective care. Assurance of our patients also increases their compliance to therapy, resulting in an increase of the desired treatment outcome. For patients who do not respond very well we may be able to modify treatment to increase their chances to respond and benefit from modern therapies.’
Investigator
Prof. Henry Lik-Yuen Chan
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