Precision Medicine’s Breakout Year: 2024 Trends

Mark Melton
Vice president of scientific
operations and development
Slope

Gene therapy and precision medicine continue to grow within the life sciences industry. When looking at trends for the coming year, it’s easy to say that researchers will continue to pursue more personalized forms of treatment.

Mark Melton, vice president of scientific operations and development at Slope, has a more specific view on trends for the coming year. He recently spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about precision medicine and what he expects from it in 2024. According to him, the major trend for the coming year will be focused on investments.

“I think 2024 will be a breakout year for precision medicine,” he says. “We’re seeing more and more investment in the genetic editing field and the targeting of specific proteins and biomarkers. This is because of the ability to target specific disease states and molecular or cellular targets to offer the best chance for an optimized response that leads to disease regression. For investors and for companies, tailoring an approach that you have a higher probability of success and more clear success criteria for versus throwing something against the wall and seeing what sticks will drive a lot of interest. It’s better for the patient as well because it could mean less side effects and tailored, specific treatments that give more hope and better progress overall. For the medical industry, it won’t be one-size-fits-all anymore.”

Melton sees the ability to tailor medicine to exact problems as the reason why investors will be attracted to the field. Investors will be able to ask researchers what exact mechanism of action a treatment or drug is targeting and get a much better idea about the expected outcome. Melton sees this as an opportunity for researchers to provide potential investors with something tangible and easy to wrap their heads around.

“If a group of people have lung cancer, what differentiates one person from another and how can we target that for the most optimal response,” Melton asks. “You can almost coin the term precision-investing because you’re looking at a precise target mechanism of action that can be evaluated by its probability based on scientific literature and published thought. That’s opposed to a company saying that it appears to have a drug that treated another disease and individuals seemed to benefit from it and then looking into how that works.”

This would give investors a better understanding of the probability of success or failure prior to putting money into a company. Obviously, no one would ever know for certain. As precision medicine advances, it can provide investors a much clearer picture than traditional forms of treatment do.

According to Melton, the increased funding is having a significant impact on one of the most difficult aspects of precision medicine: the clinical trials.

“What’s most interesting is the complexity surrounding precision-based clinical trials in particular,” he says, “such as increased sample collections, the number of vendors involved, and specialized assays are required to do the specialized testing. This Initially caused companies to stay away from it because they didn’t know how to manage that. They didn’t know how to control that ecosystem. They knew how to handle safety testing, local labs, and central labs. You saw that start to change as emerging biotechs started to get this funding to pursue precision based clinical trials. What ended up happening was that larger Pharma companies started to pick up on it and either acquired these companies or internally are starting their own dive into precision-based therapeutics.”

The complexity surrounding clinical trials will continue to be an issue for gene therapy and precision medicine. A big focus in the testing is the identification of biomarkers, which is a general term and can be applied to a variety of data points. This also requires a significant amount of specialized testing.

“That causes the need to use specialty laboratories and special assays that you weren’t using before,” Melton says. “It’s much more technical and increases the complexity of sample collections at the site for more patients. You’re collecting more blood, different sample types that can be difficult to obtain and difficult on the patient, such as spinal taps or biopsies from solid tumors. That results in an increased patient burden and an increased throughput of samples and therefore data to sift through to understand what worked and what didn’t. We’ve had some exposure to it over the past 10 years, but with everyone starting to focus on this now, we’re going to pressure test the system.”

Melton believes that 2024 will be a breakout year for precision medicine. Due to a variety of reasons, the field will be attractive to investors. As is always the case, it’s a good thing to have more money coming in.