Precision medicine: improved patentability brings new possibilities

Changes affecting the patentability of precision medicines could open the door to more research activity and lead to the discovery of new, targeted treatments that are more efficient and effective for some of the most serious health conditions, write Dr Nicholas Jones and Andrew Evitt, patent attorneys at intellectual property firm,  Withers & Rogers, in an Expert View piece.

Discovering new precision medicines and bringing them to market is a particularly costly and challenging business for drug developers, and yet the popularity of this field of research has grown significantly recently. Drug developers have found that by identifying certain biomarkers within a patient’s genetic makeup, it is possible to predict how they will react to specific therapies. This diagnostic capability means treatments are only applied to patients that will benefit from them - not those where they would be ineffective or cause excessive side effects.

One of the most well-known examples of precision medicine in action is Herceptin (trastuzumab), a drug used to treat breast cancer, but only in patients who overexpress the protein HER-2. Understanding the links between HER-2 and breast cancer has meant that only those with overexpression of the protein get this specific effective treatment, while those without this biomarker are able to avoid an unnecessary and ultimately futile form of therapy.