Oral Presentation Lowy Cancer Symposium 2015

THE ETHICS OF PERSONALISED MEDICINE:  A BRIEF INTRODUCTION (#18)

Wendy Lipworth 1
  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

There has been enormous enthusiasm for personalised medicine, but only a few personalised medicines have found their way into routine clinical practice. One part of the explanation for this may be that personalised medicine challenges some of the moral, socio-political and epistemic (knowledge-related) values we hold dear. In this presentation, I will provide a brief introduction to ethics, and illustrate some the ethical dilemmas raised by personalised medicine using three case studies: 1) the ethics of allowing “crossover” in clinical trials of personalised medicines; 2) the ethics of funding expensive personalised medicines that are not obviously “cost effective” and 3) the ethics of returning “incidental findings” that arise in the course of practicing personalised medicine.