Growth in Personalized Medicine to Drive Alliances Between Diagnostics and Pharmaceutical Industries, According to Pricewaterho...( NEW YORK July 30 /-The gr...),Health

NEW YORK, July 30 /PRNewswire/ --The growth of personalized medicine, which aims to better target treatments to patients through the use of information about an individual's genes, proteins and environment to prevent, diagnose and treat disease, is expected to increase the number of alliances between diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) report entitled Diagnostics 2009: Moving towards personalized medicine.

"We expect alliances with the pharmaceutical industry to increase in the next two-to-five years, but this will be driven by factors including the pricing of diagnostics, the extent of reimbursement coverage, and the burden of any clinical validation work required for market access," said Gerald McDougall, principal, health sciences practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The report highlights the prominence of personalized medicine in current merger and acquisition (M&A) and licensing deal activity in the in vitro diagnostics (IVD) sector. In 2008, personalized medicine motivated three of the 10 largest M&A deals and four of the licensing deals by the 10 largest IVD companies.

According to the report, a number of factors are expected to drive the continued development of personalized medicine and why diagnostics will become more important, including:

• Regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMEA), which are supporting the field of personalized medicine by introducing formal requirements to te
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