Is personalised medicine the future of healthcare?

Boston: Can precision medicine be applied to disease prevention? That was the question at the centre of the 163rd Cutter Lecture on Preventive Medicine, at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health on 6 May 2016. 

Speaking to a packed auditorium in Kresge G-1, Duncan C Thomas, professor and director of the Biostatistics Division at the University of Southern California, said that personalised prevention could work in the right circumstances.

In 2015, President Barack Obama launched his Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), earmarking $215 million to help researchers, providers, and patients work together to develop individualised care. So far, much of the focus of the PMI has been on treatment, finding ways to tailor treatment to a person’s unique biological and genetic needs. Thomas said it’s worth investigating whether the same principles can be applied to prevention.

He said that when considering targeted methods of preventions, scientists and doctors must ask a series of questions: Does an effective intervention exist? Will it change outcomes? Would prevention be improved by targeting high risk individuals, and can those people be identified? Is the intervention more effective in one risk group versus another?

Thomas talked about these questions in the context of targeted screening for colorectal cancer. He pointed to data showing that since 1975 there has been a 45% decrease in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality in the US, noting that decline can be partly attributed to better cancer treatment, but also to more effective screening practices, such as earlier detection of symptomatic cases.