About Us

An Agenda for Personalized Medicine

Dedicated to promoting the understanding and adoption of personalized medicine to benefit patients and the health system, this year PMC celebrates its tenth anniversary. With a strong board that represents the diversity of its 220 members from across the health care system and the globe, a new chair, William Dalton, CEO of M2Gen and Director of the Personalized Medicine Institute at Moffitt Cancer Center, and a healthy balance sheet, PMC is well positioned to:

• Advocate for public policies that support personalized medicine's development through scientific, regulatory, and reimbursement-related activities.
  
• Educate and build a personalized medicine-informed health care system.
  
• Form consensus among personalized medicine stakeholders to promote common goals.
  

To realize this bold agenda with its mix of educational and advocacy initiatives, PMC plans to concentrate on three overarching programs.

First, with our partners the American Association of Cancer Research and Feinstein Kean Healthcare, we will continue to develop an "innovation agenda" that emphasizes practices and policies between the science and the patient that will improve research and care. These include patient engagement, evidence generation, and a commitment to a learning-based health care system that utilizes health information technology, all of which, we assert, will improve patient outcomes while increasing efficiency and maximizing value. A conference that examines and analyzes these ideas is planned toward the end of the year.

Second, recognizing that personalized medicine depends on our ability to pay for both diagnostic and therapeutic products, PMC will focus on reimbursement issues this year. The Coalition's Tenth Annual State of Personalized Medicine Luncheon Address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. is scheduled for March 13 with guest speaker Patrick Conway, Director and Chief Medical Officer of CMS. He will share with us his vision of personalized medicine and answer questions about developing payment policies. To provide a better understanding of the evolving legal and regulatory landscape for reimbursement, the Coalition will issue an updated landscape analysis that defines the field, as did our white paper, Pathways for Oversight of Diagnostics, published last year. The new essay will set the stage for future discussions of evidentiary standards used to make decisions about paying for and adopting personalized medicine products. Along with our partner, BIO, PMC envisions a defined process that diagnostic companies and payers can agree to, which outlines the evidentiary standards used for coverage of molecular diagnostic tests before they are developed, thereby eliminating much of the confusion and contention that now characterizes the payer-diagnostic company relationship.

Third, because the business model for developing personalized medicine products is not well understood in either the pharmaceutical or diagnostic industries, PMC plans to examine those challenges by discussing the obstacles to development and seeking consensus around best practices and policy proposals which will encourage linking therapy to molecular diagnostics, leading to a published paper that will inform the field.

In addition, building on the focus group-based study published last year that analyzed the public understanding of personalized medicine, PMC has commissioned a national scientific survey to better appreciate public perceptions of the field.