Dear NBER Colleagues -
I am writing to call your attention to a new NBER project on the
Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision Medicine. The call for
proposals is below. If you are working on, or considering working on,
issues that might fall within the purview of this project, I hope that
you will submit a proposal to participate in this project. The project
will be lead by Ernie Berndt, Dana Goldman, and Jack Rowe. Please feel
free to forward this call to other researchers who you think might be
interested in participating. Thank you and all best wishes.
Jim Poterba
CALL FOR PROPOSALS -- Economic Dimensions of Personalized and Precision
Medicine
Precision medicine, the targeting of therapies on the basis of an
individual’s biological, genetic, or clinical characteristics, is
rapidly gaining prominence in health care. President Obama recently
proposed to invest $215 million in a Precision Medicine Initiative, with
the goal to further research into patient genetics and customized
treatments.The sequencing of the human genome and rapid advances in
technology have catalyzed the development of personalized
medicine.Reliable and affordable genetic analysis is well within reach
of many patients and payers. The majority of personalized therapies
currently on the market are indicated for slowing tumor growth, or for
treating infectious or orphan diseases.However, the promise has spawned
a rapidly growing industry where genetic markers of disease and
treatment are searched on a larger scale.The full promise of
personalized and precision medicine (PPM), as healthcare innovations
involving molecular diagnostics and pharmacogenomics are called, extends
beyond targeting therapies for patients who are already sick. It also
includes the ability to identify healthy individuals at elevated risk of
disease, enabling preventive measures to be targeted towards those who
could benefit most, but perhaps at substantial additional cost.PPM may
upend traditional models of health insurance, reimbursement, and
regulation.
This project will explore economic issues associated with this emerging
field.The goal is to bring together a diverse set of papers to examine
the economic and clinical factors that affect the growth of PPM, and its
effect on patients, pharmaceutical firms, care providers, and insurance
markets.This project will take a broad view of PPM and its potential
impacts.Possible topics for research studies include, but are not
limited to, the following:
•The application of information economics to precision medicine;
•Intellectual property protections for genetic data and its welfare
consequences;
•Interactions among regulation, reimbursement, and R&D in connection
with PPM;
•Insuring life and health risks in an era of PPM;
•Measuring the value of linking diagnostics and therapeutics;
•Reimbursement of combination therapies that raise efficacy for both
products;
•Regulatory and market-based approaches to ensure diagnostic quality;
•Measuring the return to R&D in the PPM sector;
•The welfare impact of early disease stratification and the use of
genetic markers;
•Alternative financing mechanisms for PPMs;
•Reimbursement rules and insurance coverage guidelines for
evidence-development procedures and other therapies that depend on
information collected after market approval.
The project welcomes both empirical and theoretical research, as well as
submissions of research by scholars who are early in their careers, and
who are not NBER affiliates.Research teams that are invited to
participate in the project will receive a $10,000 honorarium, which can
be divided among the participating authors.The research papers developed
in connection with this project will be collected in a volume published
by the University of Chicago Press or in another suitable
outlet.Research carried out in connection with NBER projects may not
make policy recommendations, endorse specific policies, or offer
normative judgments on past, current, or prospective policies.Studies
may describe and measure the consequences of both current and
prospective policies for both economic considerations and health outcomes.
The capstone research conference associated with this project will be
held in Laguna Beach, California, on September 13-14, 2017.In addition,
researchers participating in the project will be expected to attend a
pre-conference meeting on September 21-22, 2016, at Columbia University
in New York City.
To be considered for inclusion in this project, completed papers or
detailed research proposals must be uploaded by April 30, 2016, to the
following site:
http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=PPMf16
Please do not submit research that is already scheduled for publication
in another outlet.Authors chosen to participate in this project will be
notified in May, 2016.The NBER will pay for the domestic travel and
hotel expenses for up to two authors per paper at the pre-conference and
the capstone conference, as well as for discussants at the final conference.
Authors will be required to submit a several-page executive summary of
their paper prior to the conference.This will be posted on the NBER
webpage along with information on the conference.Accepted papers may
also be included in the NBER working paper series.Questions about this
conference may be addressed to confer_at_nber.org <mailto:confer_at_nber.org>.
Received on Mon Mar 21 2016 - 07:51:44 EDT
