for personalized medicine – both the industry and the patients it seeks to serve – in the United States over the long run.
Last week, the global consulting firm PwC published its Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard. The report evaluates the capacity and capability of nine key countries, including the U.S., for medical technology innovation. One of PwC’s key findings was that “the medical technology innovation ecosystem, long centered in the United States, is moving offshore.”
According to PwC there are a number of reasons why this is happening, including the increasingly labyrinthine United States regulatory system:
The citizens of countries with more efficient and less uncertain, capricious and complex regulatory approval processes will gain earlier access to innovative medical technology, and providers in those countries will benefit from more experience in using new devices…Countries with long, complex, arbitrary, nontransparent, costly approval pathways will discourage entrepreneurs and investors, causing them to launch new products elsewhere.
The PwC report made a splash when it was released last week, in part because it attempted to quantify what SACGHS and so many other advisory groups, executives and investors both before and since have noticed: bringing medical and healthcare innovation to market in the United States is an increasingly time-consuming, expensive and frustrating process.
As Luke Timmerman of Xconomy notes, although the United States may not be moving in the right direction, its fall from the top of the heap is hardly inevitable. Timmerman suggests that a few strategic “policy moves could be enough to keep the U.S. in the lead of med-tech innovation for a long time.” That’s probably correct, but it’s important that those moves are timely made.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the regulatory, reimbursement and intellectual property structures that both support and constrain personalized medicine innovation and commercialization in this country are all in need of a strategic and comprehensive overhaul.
The PwC report is a reminder that this overhaul must come relatively soon if it is to head off a significant and long-term shift in the geographic center of gravity for personalized medicine innovation and investment. And the Pretlow proposal, no matter how well-meaning, is a reminder of the “uncertain, capricious and complex” legal and regulatory framework that will continue to frustrate personalized medicine innovation in the meantime.
