If you attended the American Society for Clinical Oncology or the Biotechnology Industry Organization meetings this year, it was easy to get the sense that biotech has emerged as the direction of medicine. No longer the hit-or-miss propositions they were in the ’80s, biotech applications in healthcare are yielding progress against diseases that just a decade ago were thought to be virtually untreatable. One needs only to look at cancer, which many doctors now view as a chronic illness instead of a death sentence.
MICHAEL D. DALZELL
The shift brought about by biotech — moving from treatment of symptoms to a focus on genetic susceptibility to disease — is every bit as profound, in terms of health improvement, as the emergence of sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. Each of these shifts forced an overhaul in the way physicians were trained to understand disease and how to treat or prevent it.
So, what about biotech? The advances are coming fast and furious now, and the question is no longer “How do clinicians keep up?” but, perhaps more realistically, “What do they need to keep up with?” In her cover story, Senior Contributing Editor Linda Felcone looks at the changing role of practitioners, as med schools and physicians think about how to digest an entirely new knowledge base.
A significant piece of that knowledge base addresses appropriate use of biotech — a crucial matter, given its price. The pharmacotherapeutic model of “Let’s see if this works” cannot be applied to biotech therapies, which act on an individual’s genetic makeup. That would seem to make diagnostic tests — which can help to predict who should or shouldn’t be given a biotech therapy — as important as treatment.
Understanding this, Biotechnology Healthcare is expanding its coverage of diagnostics. Bob Carlson’s article on page 31 examines payer attitudes toward emerging diagnostic capabilities. And a new regular column, Diagnostics and Devices, debuts in this issue on page 15. We encourage you to let us know how we can make this column useful to you.
This is but one of a number of suggestions made by our editorial board over the last several months (the drug-approval table on page 13 is another). When people compliment us on the journal’s content, when they say we fill a critical niche for third-party payers and employers, or when they ask for extra copies for their staffs to read, I like to tell them that we have a lot of smart people behind us: our editorial board members, whose suggestions can be found in each issue of our publication. I am privileged to have their support.