PMAC is committed to bringing together the different stakeholders: clinicians, healthcare organizations, the industry, advocacy groups, academia, and governmental organizations, aiming to accurately map out a safe, standardized, regulated, cost-effective, and actionable precision medicine implementation strategy. PMAC will focus on three topics, each topic coordinated by its committee and representatives respectively:
Precision Prescribing
Precision prescribing personalizes prescriptions to increase medication safety and efficacy by incorporating complex information from each individual including pharmacogenetic variants, laboratory results, other medications, diseases, and more. Precision prescribing goes beyond an individual’s genetic code and also uses key health information and interactions to predict if a medication will work or cause an adverse drug reaction. Powering every prescription with precision prescribing has tremendous potential not only to increase medication safety and drug efficacy but also to reduce healthcare costs.
Precision Oncology
The premise of precision oncology is to develop treatments that target the molecular characteristics of an individual’s tumour. Some treatments go as far as to eschew where in the body the tumour originated and instead focus on particular genetic mutations. The emergence of this kind of targeted treatment is an exciting moment in the battle against cancer.
Precision Access
Racial health disparities exist due to the historical inaccessibility of healthcare to minority groups. This inaccessibility stems from a variety of factors, ranging from geographic distance to provider stereotyping. The disparities are worsened by the fact that most existing genomic research has been conducted on individuals of European descent. This renders the genomic information inapplicable to patients of other ethnic backgrounds, thus putting them at risk.
The key to reducing racial health disparities and creating a more equitable future in the healthcare space is to include more diverse participants in precision medicine research and thus, clinical access. With genetic information that spans across all ethnic backgrounds, healthcare providers will be able to customize each of their patients’ treatments in a way that will maximize the treatment’s effectiveness.