Final Days with Biomedicine

Shockingly, my time in Copenhagen is quickly coming to an end. This week I had my final exam in Biomedicine and a paper due as well. The paper covered things we learned on our two study tours and I was very pleased with our results. We focused on how improved technology has effected the biopharmaceutical industry and vice versa- since new discoveries lead to new technology. We assessed the good and bad consequences of such changes and one thing we really noticed was that if prices of new advances drugs go up, would insurance companies pay for such drugs when cheaper possibly similarly effective drugs are still available? For example new chemotherapies are more targeted so the patients have less side effects and can therefore tolerate higher doses of the drug. This means that the patient might need fewer chemotherapy sessions to get the same results and normal chemotherapy, however it would cost less. While this would drastically improve quality of life for the patient, insurance companies may not be willing to see it as such. Our final conclusion was that future advancements in bio-related technology should be made to benefit the consumer and not be advancement for the sake of advancement.