Personalized medicine industry model development

Abstract

Health care is a growing business, but its trajectory patterns are hard to decipher at the moment. This paper provides a short overview of issues important for developing business models for the personalized medicine sector (PM). The paper draws on institutional theory, particularly transaction costs economics (TCE) in an attempt to draft a conceptual framework applicable for identifying relationship patterns among institutional entities, i.e. industry actors in the Personalized Medicine (PM) field. According to the theory, relationships among industry actors are expected to evolve depending on the manifestation of many contextual factors and their developments: investment activity, public interests, technology development, market structure, regulatory environment, demographic factors, personal preferences, natural factors, etc. In our belief, a descriptive model of an industry should include a broader scope of entities besides directly competing firms. Our rationale is that market actors, in a resource dependent environment, sustain their activity by engaging in (bargaining) relationships with other entities with vested interests in the industry. Basically, we believe that predictions of future industry and particular entities’ business model development would be a function of available resources, power relations and regulation.

Keywords

• personalized medicine
• business model
• incomplete contracts
• incentives
• business scenarios