On January 19 and 20, 2010, we attended the Personalized Medicine conference sponsored by Stanford, UCSF and Silicom Ventures.

The conference was examining the emerging field of personalized medicine that is already providing benefits for the health care industry, while simultaneously looking at new business opportunities within the Life sciences marketplace.

The rebroadcast video of the speakers can be seen at http://www.dyyno.com/channel/silicomventures/

To view the Power Point presentations of speakers who permitted the conference to disseminate their slides from the PMWC, please download from the following link:
http://www.pmwc2010.com/download/

My personal take-away is that the technology is progressing much faster than the regulatory and reimbursement system will in the next 5 years. As Kathryn Philips from UCSF explained, it is expected that the key stakeholders like the FDA, CMS, physicians, PBM, private payers are increasing their need for proving the clinical evidence and cost economical values of these new personalized diagnostic tests and therapeutic regimens. As the cost of getting these new diagnostics and therapeutics approved, reimbursed and accepted by the clinical community goes up exponentially, the intrinsic value of developing unique personalized medicine for smaller groups of patients goes down to potential entrepreneurs and investors defying the principle and value of personalized medicine!