Why genomics & bioinformatics will matter to medtech companies

Gene-based precision medicine has become central to the strategies of many pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies working to prevent and treat cancer using bioinformatics and genomics. Rob Morgan, Partner, shares his thoughts on why gene-based precision medicine matters increasingly to companies in the wider MedTech and medical device market, and the threats and opportunities it presents.

What do we mean by precision medicine?

Precision medicine (sometimes ‘personalised’ or ‘genomic’ medicine) is an emerging approach to preventing, treating and managing an individual’s medical treatment by focusing on the genetic causes of disease rather than a patient’s symptomatic consequences. It is based primarily on DNA sequencing technologies which are becoming ever cheaper and faster, while also considering the individual’s symptoms, biochemical and imaging metrics as well as other environmental and lifestyle factors. By focusing on genetic causes of disease, precision medicine is designed to avoid potentially vague or misleading symptoms by determining the exact piece of DNA that is the disease source.

Why precision medicine matters to MedTech companies

By focusing patient assessments on distinct disease causes, therapy can be tailored to the biological functions that are going wrong. $billions are now aimed at designing new drugs to treat specific gene mutations causing a wide variety of cancer types. In addition to pharmaceutical design, therapy is being transformed as we better understand how tumour cells with specific genetic mutations can react better or worse to radio and chemo-therapies, driving huge new opportunities in targeted design.

Precision medicine outside oncology is catching up fast as we better understand the wider impact of genetics across human disease. There are fast growing opportunities for MedTech companies to offer diagnostic solutions based on genomics and design new interventional therapies better suited to more precisely defined diseases; we’ve started to call this ‘Precision MedTech’. Advances in genomics also pose a threat to the current generation of MedTech, either as better-specified disease activity becomes more druggable, or as therapeutic device requirements become more narrowly defined toward very specific functions.

As medicine increasingly focuses on genetics to stratify disease and therapy, MedTech companies should be aware of the potential impact of genomics on their markets and plan for the opportunities which may emerge.