Insurance companies balking at personalized medications
So-called personalized medicine — tailoring treatments to an individual’s genetic traits — is showing great promise, but insurance companies are balking on paying for the very costly medications.
Each treatment typically costs multiple thousands of dollars, and when accepted, the medications add to the already high price of U.S. health insurance.
There’s a summary of the problem in an Mercury News piece, which cites successful products by Silicon Valley companies like Genomic Health (breast-cancer), Genentech (cancer), Cholestech (heart attack/stroke) and Monogram Biosciences (HIV) — all of which are facing challenges getting covered. Finally, there’s private company, XDx, which predicts heart transplant rejections, which we wrote about today, and is seeking new funding.
If it really takes 15 to 20 years for insurance companies accept these medications — as one cited study suggests — it could hamper the personalized health-care start-up boom going on in the valley.
Next Story: Macrovision buys consumer electronics software co., Mediabolic for $43.5M
Previous Story: 4HomeMedia has raised $2.85M to control your home remotely
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
