Although precision, or personalized, medicine is still new, the ability to use genomics to customize patient treatment has already led to life-saving advances in patient care.

Especially in oncology, there are a number of very precise genomic indicators to determine how a particular patient will respond, says Jonathan Sheldon, global vice president of Oracle Health Sciences. For example, a particular gene mutation occurs in about 50% of melanoma patients, and those with that mutation are responsive to a particular drug from Roche.

That kind of high-potential scenario helps explain why President Obama in January announced the landmark Precision Medicine Initiative, a proposed $215 million investment to be spread across four areas.

While $215 million is a small percentage of the overall investment in biomedical research, its important in that the federal government for the first time is unambiguously supporting personalized medicine, says Edward Abrahams, PhD, president of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, a nonprofit education and advocacy group in Washington DC. It pushes us into a new era focused on personalized medicine.

Abrahams and Sheldon will discuss the latest developments in precision medicine at Oracle Industry Connect 2015 in Washington DC on March 25 and 26. The agenda includes several sessions on the topic.

According to Edwards, the real conversation revolves around where the White House wants the money to go. The funding breaks down as follows:

Three of those projects highlight the increasingly intrinsic nature of technology in precision medicine and the issues that come with that, from the need for responsible data sharing to standards-based interoperability in an infrastructure that complies with regulatory requirements. These are the building blocks we need to move the agenda forward, says Edwards.

The systems necessary to support precision medicine widely are not yet in place, says Sheldon. The pressure will grow exponentially as precision medicine expands from its early niches in major research hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to a more mainstream clinical setting, he says.

Sheldon points to three critical developments that must happen before we can extract full value from precision medicine: 1. Set the Scalability Bar High

Although the goal is to build a million-strong national research cohort, thats still a drop in the bucket compared with how fast genomic technologies are being adopted, says Sheldon. Moreover, as testing costs continue to decreasewhat cost $100 million in 2001 is about $1,000 todayand more people can interpret the data, the rate of adoption should further increase, especially at the clinical level. On top of that, Sheldon points out that current cutting-edge genomic techniques are likely just the tip of the iceberg and next-generation techniques will produce even more data per sample. Meanwhile, newer big data technology requires not just genetic data, but also associated clinical, behavioral, physiological, and environmental data. The bottom line, he says, is that it is critical that the infrastructure we build to support this precision medicine initiative can scale far beyond what we can envisage today.

Excerpt from:

Three Steps Critical To The Advance Of Precision Medicine