Terry Flynn recently blogged on how treatment tailored to genes will kill economic evaluation. It’s a catchy title that I hope will draw health economists working outside of genetics into a growing debate on the best way to do economic evaluation in genetics and genomics. However, I don’t entirely agree with everything that Terry said and wanted to respond on a few points:
genetics
Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation
Yesterday in Oxford we hosted a conference titled “Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation”. The conference aimed to explore the challenges of implementing genomic medicine into widespread clinical practice, and there was a particular focus on the generation of economic evidence and the ethical issues that arise in the resource allocation decisions required to allow personalised medicine to be realised.
I was pleased to be asked to speak at the event, and I presented alongside Jilles Fermont on “Methodological issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies and a case study of these issues in the research setting”. It was an interesting day overall, and I suspect that others will blog more extensively on the various topics that were discussed. For now, I’ll leave a link to our slides, in case anybody is interested in this topic. For more information on the day itself, please visit the conference website or follow the proceedings on Twitter via the hashtag #PMRAoxford.
What are the real costs of sequencing?
I normally steer well clear of the topic of sequencing in newborn babies because this area raises so many social, legal and ethical questions that go way beyond the clinical/economics perspective that we’re used to considering. However, I read an interesting commentary piece the other day by Jacques Beckmann titled ‘Can we afford to sequence every newborn baby’s genome?’ which I think deserves a wider audience for two reasons. One, it reminded me of a comment that Professor Sir John Burn (director, NHS England) made during the recent Astellas Innovation Debate in London. Jonathan Dimbleby asked if he could see whole genome sequencing (WGS) being rolled out to everyone across the UK, to which he replied: “the reality is that even when we get the 100,000 Genomes Project fully operational and get it absorbed, we’ll only be doing maybe 30,000-50,000 whole genomes a year – we’d have to do 600,000 a year to catch up with the new babies”. Second, I think there are some points raised in this article that go beyond newborn screening and are directly applicable to the economic evaluation of genomic testing in a variety of clinical contexts.
Genomics, the data revolution and health economics – the 2015 Astellas Innovation Debate
Last week I attended the Astellas Innovation Debate (“i-Genes: What the DNA and Data revolutions mean for our health”) at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. This was an interesting event and I was pleased to get the opportunity to make a couple of points during the debate itself. I also wrote about the debate and the wider implications of this revolution from a health economics perspective for the BMJ. You can read this blog here.
Interested readers can watch the entire 2015 debate at http://www.innovationdebate.com/.
Introduction
Hello. Chances are you’re a health economist, although you might also be a researcher in a different field of healthcare. You might even be a scientist (apologies in advance for any bad science that might follow). Whoever you are, you’re very welcome. The aim of this introductory post is to tell you what you should expect from this blog. Hopefully you’ll be sufficiently intrigued to return, read some more articles and contribute to the growing debate surrounding the application of standard health economic methods in the field of genomics.
This blog is going to assume that you know a little bit about genomics. Specifically, this blog is going to assume that you have at least read the “What are genomic technologies?” section of this blog, a short introduction for a layperson who already has a little bit of science knowledge. Of course, many of you will have a greater knowledge of genetics and genomics than this simple introduction, but this blog is intended to be broadly accessible to stimulate wide debate, so the aim is to keep the genomics jargon to a minimum. This blog is also going to assume that the average reader has some basic knowledge about health economics. Those who don’t could do a lot worse than frequent the excellent “Academic Health Economists’ Blog”.
Health Economics and Genomics 