Ethical challenges of
Personalized Medicine considered at Vatican workshop
Personalized Medicine represents a revolution in medical
science and raises several ethical challenges, says Professor Yechiel Michael
Barilan.
By Devin Watkins
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosts a workshop in the
Vatican this week on “The Revolution of Personalized Medicine”.
The event carries a provocative subtitle: “Are we going to
cure all diseases and at what price?”
Personalized medicine is a therapeutic approach that
separates people into different groups according to their genetic information
in order to tailor decisions, interventions, and drug therapy to the individual
patient.
Professor Yechiel Michael Barilan, an expert in Internal
Medicine at Israel’s Tel Aviv University, is the workshop’s Academic Director.
Professor Barilan told Vatican News’ Gabriela Ceraso that
Personalized Medicine represents a dual revolution.
It promises a partial revolution in medicine, he said,
because it aims at getting “more and more specific at the molecular level of
every disease”. This means examining the genomic and molecular features of
diabetes, for instance.
The bigger revolution, said Prof. Barilan, is “to try to
abandon the concept of disease altogether and, on one hand, just collect lots
of biological data (proteins, genes), have the computers calculate them, like
Google does, and then come out with specific health instructions”.
Ethical challenges
Prof. Barilan admitted that Personalized Medicine poses
several ethical challenges.
One general risk is conflict of interest and bias in the
industry, though, he said, every industry runs this risk.
The doctor-patient relationship could also suffer as a
result of Personalized Medicine, because computers could come between the two
as they are relied upon in the place of doctors to analyze patient data.
“There is also a risk of having a new definition of what
health is, and it’s not necessarily what we as persons and humans believe
health is,” he said.
Risk of alienation
Personalized Medicine, said Prof. Barilan, even runs the
risk of alienating certain people from society, because they carry genetic
traits or disease markers that could be classified as “high risk” or they might
have a low response-rate to therapy.
It might even cause the “reorganization of human society
along the lines of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are as a biological creature,” he
said.
Ultimate human goals
Prof. Barilan said the issues surrounding Personalized
Medicine – and science in general – is related to “ultimate human goals”, or
the perceived purpose of human life.
“Doing science and doing medicine without think about
ultimate human goals and values is, in a way, futile or shallow, and could be
extremely harmful.”
Both the Vatican and the scientists present at the workshop
share a commitment to ultimate human goals, said Prof. Barilan, even if there
is disagreement over what those goals may be.
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