I am listening to the story of a woman who had malignant mesothelioma eleven years ago, was given 8-14 month prognosis, and is alive because her best friend is a specialist in personalized medicine at the University of Arizona. He found through tumor tissue analysis that her markekers were the same as those of someone with chronic myelogenous leukemia, which is treatable.

So there she is, up on the stage, a living example of why Arizona has committed itself to the Biomedical Roadmap to develop personalized medicine and customized care as a special industry for Arizona.

But here is the problem.

Right now, personalized medicine is for the rich, and most of us won’t be able to afford it. The speaker I heard admitted that her health insurance has paid millions over the years to keep her alive.

We MUST figure out a way to make these advances available to people at less cost to both the health care system and the individual patient. Ironically.personalized medicine and especially molecular profiling may end up saving, rather than costing, the system money, because we will be able to stop offering chemotherapy to people it won’t help.

Right now, one of the reasons the last six months of life cost so much is that we spray these expensive medicines at people without knowing whether they can really help. I’m the process, we ruin the patient’s quality of life and literally waste billions.

I found it eye-opening to learn that the same expensive interventions, done only where they are truly going to be worthwhile, could actually help save our health care system.