Precision medicine is cost effective and can make preventive interventions, it was highlighted in a panel discussion on the first day of the 2016 edition of the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) on Tuesday.
"Precision medicine has the potential for disease prevention and risk assessment," said Dr Victor J Dasu, chair of WISH report on 'Precision medicine, a global action plan for impact.'
“Precision medicine, a cost-saving programme, can be used across several areas. It is the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to a particular disease or their response to a specific treatment,” he explained.
“Precision medicine gives the opportunity for the most effective prevention of disease or treatment for a given patient, improving care quality while reducing unnecessary diagnostic testing and therapies. When applied at the population level, it holds immense promise for public health, particularly in disease prevention and risk assessment," he highlighted.
However, precision medicine faces significant challenges and barriers to its broad implementation and integration in medical practice globally, the expert noted. “We have identified the challenges in four key action areas that need to be addressed to fully enable precision medicine. They are: patient and public engagement; evidence generation; implementation and data ownership, privacy and sharing,” he said.
Dr Asma al-Thani, dean of the College of Health Science at Qatar University as well as the vice chairperson of Qatar Biobank, said that Qatar Genome Project aims to build a genome reference of the population.
“The Qatar Genome Project is a nationwide programme that aims for more personalised care rather than personalised medicine.The pilot phase was started by using the available resources and following the Islamic ethical practices.”
“The data is stored at the Sidra Medical and Research Center, our partner in the project. We are focusing on this project as a means of prevention of diseases. From the pilot phase we have detected that 47% of the contributors in the project had health issues which they were not aware of,” she added.
The research report has submitted several recommendations to make precision medicine in various areas of challenges to overcome the barriers. The panel discussion also included other academics and leaders in the field of precision medicine.
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