GekeVenn: GEISINGER / REGENERON

HHS = Health & Human Services
Note that the first two listed, Reisinger and Nord, are or were lobbyists for Geisinger; the remainder lobbied for Regeneron.

In 2015, President Obama announced something called the Precision Medicine program. It's another public-private partnership that we've been taught to embrace, despite the fact that most public-private partnerships are just handouts of government preference, protections, and subsidies to certain private corporations.

The project would create personalized medicine based on each individual's genetics. Dina Maron, writing for Scientific American, described the Precision Medicine program: “In addition to patient histories the endeavor would include genetic data and information from devices like wearable health monitors, and the collection of bacteria, fungi and viruses in and on the body called the microbiome.”

A few companies already had a jump start on the project. A year earlier, the Regeneron pharmaceutical company had teamed up with Geisinger Health to create a medical database that sequenced exomes (the part of a genome formed by exons).

Apart from the privacy issues the Precision Medicine program raises, the New Yorker mentioned other problems with the project: “As scientists continue to draw connections between DNA data and health outcomes, the problem of interpretability continues to grow. Many doctors are simply not qualified to make sense of genetic tests, or to communicate the results accurately to their patients.”

Nick Taylor, writing for FierceBiotech explains the endgame of both Regeneron and Geisinger: “Regeneron hooked up with Geisinger in January 2014 to sequence the exomes of 250,000 people. The idea is to build a database from which Regeneron can uncover drug targets like PCSK9, the gene inhibited by its hotly-anticipated, Sanofi-partnered cholesterol drug. Regeneron began building the database to support its in-house R&D programs, but Reuters reports it is now interested in opening up access. The idea is to make the database a key component of the Precision Medicine program and have other drugmakers fund the work.”

With three lobbyists having held prominent positions in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration, Regeneron definitely had an edge.

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