Government Policy Must Be Nimble to Leverage Benefits of New Technologies

The readings for this week point to disruptive technologies that will likely dramatically alter societies and economies. The potential of these technologies is incredibly exciting, but government policies could stand in the way of us leveraging all of the benefits. It’s not just economies that need to adapt to these disruptions; government policy needs to adapt, too-- and sooner rather than later to unleash the potential of these technologies.

The think tank I worked at prior to coming to Heinz frequently focused on ways to promote medical innovation. Our scholars argued that the vast amounts of data available about patient responses to drugs combined with advances in our understanding of genetics have the potential to find personalized cures for seemingly incurable diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s. Advances in big data and gene sequencing (both referred to in the McKinsey report) have allowed researchers to pinpoint the specific genetic variations that determine whether a patient responds to a treatment or not. While a drug might fail to cure the majority patients (and therefore flunk existing FDA approval standards), it could work on a small subset of them with similar genetic variations (see the 2010 Sloan Kettering trial referenced in “What Failed, the New Cancer Treatment or Regulators?” below). The technology to match subsets of patients with treatments that will cure them has existed for years—yet Congress only passed a bill encouraging the FDA to allow this technology to be incorporated into clinical trials last year, and the timeline for implementation extends through 2025.[1] Patients lying in hospital beds today could be on the path to better health tomorrow if these regulatory barriers had adapted sooner.

All of this feet-dragging is within the United States; how long will it take for other countries to implement similar procedures? Will they all be able to? Aggregating data across multiple countries would lead to even more powerful results, but as the Global Trends 2030 report points out, the potential for multilateral cooperation is not high in the current political climate.

Even technologies that don’t face governmental barriers now could face them in the future; for instance, many states are in the process of deciding how they will address self-driving cars.[2] While governments do have a role in promoting safety, if we’re to see the full benefits of emerging technologies, they must be prepared to be nimble in their regulatory and legislative responses to changing technology.

Recommended further reading:

Peter Huber and Paul Howard, “Personalized Medicine is Here,” The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2017

Peter Huber and Paul Howard, “What Failed, the New Cancer Treatment or Regulators? ,” The Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2015

Peter Huber, The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century Medicine (Basic Books, 2013)

---

[1] "Proposed FDA Work Plan for 21st Century Cures Act Innovation Account Activities," U.S. Food and Drug Administration, accessed September 3, 2017, https://www.fda.gov/downloads/advisorycommittees/committeesmeetingmaterials/scienceboardtothefoodanddrugadministration/ucm556618.pdf.

[2] "Autonomous Vehicles: Self-Driving Vehicles Enacted Legistlation," National Conference of State Legislatures, accessed September 3, 2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/autonomous-vehicles-self-driving-vehicles-enacted-legislation.aspx.