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It's In His DNA

Barack Obama may represent the first President who understands personalized medicine at more than a conceptual level.

BY DANIEL S. LEVINE
The Journal of Life Sciences

Several years ago, a friend of Robert Wells told him about a scientist who was conducting cutting-edge genetics research in the heart of Amish country. At the time, Wells was vice president for corporate affairs and international markets for the genetics tools company Affymetrix, which became connected with the researcher D. Holmes Morton.

Wells related this story earlier this week at The Annual Burrill Personalized Medicine Meeting, which is put on each year by Burrill & Company, the owner of The Journal of Life Sciences. The work, notes Wells, caught the attention of a reporter at The New York Times, and when the article appeared in November 2005, it caught the attention of a young senator from Illinois, who approached his health policy advisor and told her he wanted to do something to foster such work.

The result of that was Senator Barack Obama’s proposed Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2007. (The comments he made when he introduced the legislation can be read on TJOLS. Though the bill did not make its way through the legislative process, Wells, who is a co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based government relations firm HealthFutures, expects the legislation will be reintroduced by another senator after Obama takes office as President.

Wells told the story to emphasize a point that has him and others involved in the area of personalized medicine excited about the in coming commander-in-chief. “We have elected, from our own parochial perspective, the first President who understands personalized medicine at more than just a conceptual level,” said Wells. “And we’ve elected probably the first president who had a parent pass away from cancer at a very young age. And we elected a president who’s bringing with him a team of people who know these issues well.”

Wells said under normal times, this would put the “wind at your back,” but he acknowledges these are not normal times. The new administration comes into office with a long list of problems to solve, many of which are both complex and demanding. But, he adds, the new administration is “predisposed to understanding that innovation and new technologies and new approaches are key to changing this healthcare system.”

The transformative role personalized medicine can play in reshaping healthcare and addressing the problems caused by our current practice of medicine has not been lost on some members of the Bush administration. Both U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni have been big proponents of it, and the FDA has pushed along its Critical Path initiative.

“There’s become this near perfect storm of people of various touch points along the policy chain that have really understood that the future is about not your grandfather's concept of medicine, but something that is very new and very different and very oriented to where the future is,” said Wells. “There’s not one way to do it. You can’t just wave a magic wand and say there is one way of doing this. It goes across all of the agencies, across the Congress, across, as I have said, multiple touch points, but all along that chain we see it happening. The challenge for the new administration is going to be to try and harness that energy to some degree and try to coordinate it.”

Let’s hope that it’s not only a move away from your grandfather’s concept of medicine, but his concept of presidents as well.