Personalized Medicine: how to Switch from the Concept to the Integration into the Clinical Development Plan to Obtain Marketing Authorization

¹ Clinical Research Unit, Bicêtre Hospital, Paris, France
² Medical Pharmacology DepartmentFaculty of Medecine, Lille 2 University, Lille, France
³ Merck Serono Laboratory, Lyon, France

Correspondence and offprints: Dominic Cellier, Merck Serono Laboratory, 37 rue Saint Romain, 69379 Lyon Cedex 08, France. Email: dominic.cellier@merckgroup.com

Received: 20 March 2012
Accepted: 4 June 2012

Abstract

One of the challenges of the coming years is to personalize medicine in order to provide each patient with an individualized treatment plan. The three objectives of personalized medicine are to refine diagnosis, rationalize treatment and engage patients in a preventive approach.

Personalization can be characterized by various descriptors whether related to the field, biology, imaging, type of lesion of the entity to be treated, comorbidity factors, coprescriptions or the environment As part of personalized medicine focused on biological markers including genetics or genomics, the integration of the clinical development plan to obtain marketing authorization may be segmented in 3 stages with a known descriptor identified before clinical development, a known descriptor discovered during clinical development or a known descriptor known after clinical development. For each stage, it is important to clearly define the technical optimization elements, to specify the expectations and objectives, to examine the methodological aspects of each clinical development phase and finally to consider the fast changing regulatory requirements in view of the few registered therapeutics complying with the definition of personalized medicine as well as the significant technological breakthroughs according to the screened and selected biomarkers.

These considerations should be integrated in view of the time required for clinical development from early phase to MA, i.e. more than 10 years.

Moreover, business models related to the economic environment should be taken into account when deciding whether or not to retain a biomarker allowing the selection of target populations in a general population.