Philosophical Problems in Personalised Medicine (registration required)

The notion of “personalized medicine” has recently received a lot of attention. While the term is being used in a number of different ways, the core idea is that therapies in the future will be increasingly targeted to the individual, often genetic, characteristics of patients. This development raises questions of how clinical research evidence and regulatory requirements need to be modified when therapies are tailored to patients’ individual characteristics. The dominant model for assessing therapeutic effectiveness, and increasingly for assessing health policies, prioritizes evidence from (large) Randomized Clinical Trials. However, such trials may be unfeasible where personalized medicine is concerned. Moreover, personalized medicine raises connected issues in health economics: many of these treatments are very expensive, and reliable cost-effectiveness data may be very difficult to obtain.

Although ethical issues concerning genetic screening have received some attention, little philosophical work has focused upon the epistemological issues of providing evidence for causal claims about personalized treatments, and for claims about the reliability and cost-effectiveness of these treatments. To address this shortfall and to enable a broadly informed discussion of these philosophical issues, this workshop will bring together experts in personalized medicine from research and policy with philosophers and health economists.

For further details, see here.