African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 6 (14), pp. 1603-1607, 18 July 2007   

ISSN 1684–5315 © 2007 Academic Journals        

Review

Future of health technology assessment studies in gene and cell therapies

Aysegul Akbay Yarpuzlu¹* and Nazli Atak²
 

¹Institute of Biotechnology, Ankara University,Turkey, Sehit Ersan Cad.34/5 Cankaya 06680-Ankara-Turkey.

²Faculty of Health Sciences, Ankara University, Turkey.
 

*Corresponding author. E-mail: yarpuzlu@medicine.ankara.edu.tr. Tel: 90-532-3483297. Fax: 90-312-4663834.

Accepted 2 July, 2007

The application of new knowledge and technological change is a key driver of the achievements in policy decisions in health care environments at macro and micro level to achieve better health outcomes. The newly emerging stem cell therapies and genomics technologies stay at the interface of Research and Development (R&D) endeavours and clinical trials. However, as should be noted, health care decisions need to be based on Health Technology Assessments (HTA) that should be based on objective criteria as efficacy, effectiveness, quality, safety, psychological, social, ethical, organisational and professional implications as well as cost effectiveness and further macro public health economical assessments. At the present state, neither stem cell therapies nor genomic technologies are supported by such data to allow health and public policy decision makers to take evidence based decisions which makes the time still early for these R&D applications to be disseminated and used extensively on broad international settings.

Key words: Health technology assessment, gene therapy, cell therapy.