The Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), introduced in 2015, is an innovative research program with the ambitious goal of transforming how we treat illness and promote health. This national initiative encourages healthcare professionals to abandon one-size-fits-all approaches and focus instead on prevention and treatment. The central concept involves tailoring care to each patient’s unique combination of genetics, biology, environment, and lifestyle. Doing so enables healthcare professionals and medical researchers to make more precise predictions regarding which disease-specific treatments and preventative measures will be effective in various populations and individuals.
The term “precision medicine” has only recently entered the medical lexicon, but the idea has a long history. A blood transfusion, for instance, must match the blood type of the recipient. There are other similar examples, but the application of precision medicine has remained somewhat restricted. In coming years, however, researchers anticipate that an ever broader range of healthcare and medical approaches will involve precision medicine.
Advances in precision medicine have already yielded a number of new treatments specifically adapted to patients’ unique traits, such as their genetic composition or that of a tumor. Such approaches are transforming the response to illnesses such as cancer, increasing survival rates and decreasing the side effects of drugs and other therapeutic measures.
With access to precision medicine, medical professionals can develop treatment and prevention plans specific to each patient’s genome, medical history, way of life, and dietary habits. Such efforts rely on a combination of data sources, including data relating to metabolomics (the chemicals within the human body at a given time) and the microbiome (the microorganisms within or around the body) and information that physicians and patients gather and report. For health data to be useful, they must be portable and easily shared among patients, researchers, and healthcare professionals.
Building Trust and Protecting Privacy
The White House established an interagency task force in March 2015 with the objective of formulating a set of trust and privacy principles. The results form part of the pledge to include privacy in the framework for the PMI. The specific aims, then, involve
- establishing an inclusive and dynamic system of governance,
- ensuring transparency so as to foster accountability and build trust,
- understanding the preferences of individuals by consulting the members of diverse communities who are comfortable with the risks involved in gathering and sharing data,
- empowering individuals with access to knowledge and information,
- maintaining the appropriate access to and use and sharing of data, and
- guaranteeing the integrity and quality of healthcare data.
Data Security Policies
The PMI’s Data Security Policy provides guidelines and a framework for institutions that implement precision medicine initiatives and helps them to make informed decisions. Such policies build on the PMI’s Privacy and Trust Principles.
