The 17th Century saw two scientists independently discover the mathematics of continuous change, now called calculus. The more famous of the two, Sir Issac Newton was looking to improve navigation for the might and majesty of the British Empire. More humbly, Gottfried Leibntiz was looking at how to bombard enemy fortifications with greater accuracy.
A meeting of biotechnology industry leaders two weeks ago reminded me of the often close connection between scientific discovery and the solution of practical and commmercial problems. It also reminded me of how scientific discoveries have a life of their own and can outgrow their origins.
The meeting in question was the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. JPMorgan as in the financial powerhouse.
The CEO of Chiron, the company recently famous for botching the supply of flu vaccine, confessed that while Chiron’s vaccine division wasn’t doing so hot, its genetic testing division was going great guns. And with good cause: the FDA just approved Chiron’s gene-based diagnostic test for how well people metabolize certain drugs.
What biotech industry experts saw in this and similar developments was a fine-tuning of drugs used to treat disease. Will you react badly to a drug? Which drug works best for you? What’s the right dose?
In one way, this is just more of the same kind of pharmaceutical bombardment, but with greater accuracy. On the other hand, this science supposedly brings with it a focus on the individualization of health care.
But individualization is only an opportunity that Chiron-style gene-based diagnostics open up. As the JPMorgan conference highlighted, these developments are hitched to drug therapy. Avoiding bad reactions and using the right drug at the right dose might be good things. That is, if drugs are the right answer to the question of how to treat your illness and maintain your health. Too often, they are not.
Drugs disrupt what your body is doing. Your health care needs to work with your body, not against it. Drugs should be the last, not the first resort in treating illness and maintaining health.
Your health care should start with supporting how your body specifically works. Your health care should be a negotiation with your body. Gene-based diagnostics can play an important role in those negotiations. But not without unhitching it from the cannons of drug therapy.
As in politics, so in health: negotiation before bombardment.
