In 2014, expect medicine to get personal.
Doctors and researchers around Boston are working to make drugs and health care delivery more individualized than ever. And patients will play a bigger role both in medical research and in their own health care, experts told the Herald.
"With personalized medicine, we're going to know what drugs work on certain people and what drugs don't work on certain people," said Robert Coughlin, president and chief executive of MassBio, the state's biotech industry group.
"I think you're going to see that for all therapies going forward," he said.
At Brigham and Women's Hospital, researchers in the year ahead will hone in on what's known as precision medicine — decoding genes to identify people at risk of developing diseases and treating them before they get sick.
The hospital is expecting an uptick in the number of patients — sick and healthy — who get their genomes decoded to find out their risk levels for a variety of diseases, said Dr. Christine Seidman, director of the Biomedical Research Institute at Brigham and Women's.
Researchers also plan to spend more time simply talking to patients as they work to develop new, life-saving therapies.
"We've really incorporated patients into the mix," Seidman said. "Having patients be involved and saying, 'I can help here' is huge."
Patients also will be expected to play a bigger role in tracking their own health with apps that record exercise and blood pressure. "There's an interest now all of a sudden in activity tracking," said Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare. "So many of the chronic illnesses — diabetes, high blood pressure — would all be improved if patients were just a little more active every day."
Changes in health care delivery are rippling down to the labs where medical devices are invented. Device makers must make sure their products fit into a health care industry where everything — including patient records — is going digital.
"Medical device developers are looking at ways to make sure the device is accurate but also can support the health care delivery system by storing data," said Tom Sommer, president of the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council.
Coughlin said 2014 will shape up to be a healthy year for medical research, with as many as a dozen Massachusetts biotech companies going public. "The fact that Wall Street's coming back is only adding more cash when it's needed," he said.
But as some companies mature and thrive, other researchers are suffering from the loss of a crucial source of funding.
The federal government slashed research dollars last year as part of a round of budget cuts called sequestration.
"There's a great fear right now… of research money drying up," said Kevin O'Sullivan,
president and CEO of Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, a biotech incubator in Worcester. "There's such instability in the federal government."
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