How can we ensure the success of precision medicine?

Recent advances in biomolecular medicine have led to an explosion of disease-relevant, individual-specific molecular information with the potential to impact every phase of the patient journey, from diagnosis and prognosis to therapeutic intervention.

In parallel with these developments, it has become increasingly apparent that each individual’s biological make-up makes one more or less susceptible to certain conditions, and more or less likely to respond favourably/unfavourably to particular therapeutic interventions. This realization forms the foundation of current strives towards personalised healthcare.

The ultimate goal in personalised healthcare is to combine conventional clinico-pathological information with state-of-the-art molecular phenotyping approaches to create diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic solutions tailored precisely for each individual patient. Hence, the preferred term “precision medicine”, which we have adopted in this report.

We envisage that this approach will deliver significant health benefits, but will also present a new set of challenges. Ensuring the success of precision medicine will require that these challenges are acknowledged and effectively addressed early on.

We have identified five fundamental requirements that must be met to ensure the success of the precision medicine endeavour:

1. More incentives for innovation
2. New disease classification systems that incorporate emerging molecular data
3. More streamlined clinical trial regulation frameworks
4. Effective data interpretation and clinical decision support (CDS)
5. Stimulation of consumer interest and active patient participation

These requirements, aside from ensuring that precision medicine “lives up to the hype”, calls for collaboration between all major healthcare stakeholders (clinicians, patients, government, academia, industry) on a scale previously not witnessed. This activity will benefit from careful administration to ensure that all members are moving with common purpose.

In this Industry Agenda report, we provide detailed discussion of how each of these critical challenges can be addressed and propose strategies to ensure the smooth uptake of precision medicine approaches during the complicated initial phases of implementation.

Author: Lord Darzi is Professor of Surgery at Imperial College in London and Chair of the Institute of Global Health Innovation. He is also a member of the Global Agenda Council on Personalized and Precision Medicine.

Image: A Molecular biologist takes enzyme from a culture in Hamburg REUTERS/Christian Charisius