Blockbuster Medicine Versus Personalized Medicine

In a free market system everything is determined by supply and demand. Today, the cheapest, most affordable service is the information service. You can store all your personal information belonging to the last 2 decades, a piece of information of 200Gbytes for less than the price of a cup of coffee. If you want to store all of your genetic information you need 20Mbytes, 1/100 of a 2Gbytes flash disk.

When genome sequencing will be affordable enough, that means under$1000, you will be carrying your information from your doctor to the pharmacy. Your electronic prescription will be fed into a database at CVS with your personal DNA information. The computer will personalize your drug in 24 hours and the next day you will pick up your drug that is tailored for you from the CVS store.

Another global model will be, you do everything on line and in 3 days your tailored drug will be shipped to your door from the big-drug giant.

No, this is not science fiction . News from the industry are denoting the tip of the iceberg.

Pharmaceutical giants such as Merck have built one of the world's richest industries on blockbusters such as Vioxx that treat millions for the most common diseases. Merck took a body blow when it had to pull its popular arthritis drug Vioxx off the market on Sept. 30 because it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in some patients; the desicion will instantly slice more than 11% from revenues.

Today, the most promising drugs in the pipeline are designed for a much smaller slice of patients. They are designed for specific individuals.

Mass marketed Blockbusters are not.

Before the social media era people used to work only with global brands such as google, netscape, yahoo and such, as blockbusters of the internet industry. Now, people personalize their profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and such.

MY-Space is the best example brand of the novel trend.