Precision Medicine: The Gold Standard of Future
In April 2022, The Nordic Precision Medicine Forum organized an in-person annual meeting after a hiatus due to COVID-19. Senior Scientist at Vitae Evidence, Jimita Toraskar, offers her highlights from the event.
Stockholm seemed a perfect meeting point for all Nordic delegates who attended the annual Precision Medicine Forum, where strategy and innovation were at the forefront of the agenda. Presentations covered a range of topics including biomarkers, next generation testing, clinical trials, data-driven precision medicine, real world implementations, patient perspectives and thorough policy overviews of each of the Nordic countries, delivered by key individuals from Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, respectively.
The Nordic Precision Medicine Forum 2022 started with an acknowledgment of the tragedies resulting from the pandemic but went on to share many positive developments. In the past two years, we have witnessed advances in digital health & remote monitoring, changes in clinical trials, and improvements to the vaccine development process. The pandemic has made the public more aware of their own well-being and patients want to become empowered with knowledge so that they can participate in their own clinical decision-making process.
Moving on to the discussion on advances in precision medicine…
According to The National Cancer Institute, precision medicine is an approach to patient care that allows doctors to select treatments most likely to help patients, based on a genetic understanding of the patient’s disease. It was well conveyed to the audience that though precision medicine in the Nordics is moving from bench to bedside, there is much still to be done to seize its full potential. Even with continued high levels of investment, extensive biobank and cohort data and commitment from governments, it has been challenging to bring transformation on a nationwide scale to the Nordic region.
Main challenges in precision medicine continue to circle around standardizing, regulating, and utilizing substantial amounts of health data.
Thorben Seeger, Chief Business Development Officer at Lifebit mentioned that 97% of all data produced by hospitals each year goes unused. There is great untapped potential in data to transform the quality of medical care. Thorben also elaborated on the concept of security by design.
Chris Wigley, CEO at Genomics England underlined that data-sharing and collaboration does not need to be scary. With the help of innovative technologies, we can analyze the data without taking it out of source. Data-analysis can be compared to visiting an aquarium where you go to see the fish (metaphor for data) but you do not take the fish out of the tank (metaphor for source where data is stored).
Paul Franks, Senior Director in Clinical Science at Novo Nordisk Foundation highlighted that today people are dealing with the challenges of data collected from next-generation sequencing, but it is just a matter of time before we will be dealing with next-generation epidemiology or next-generation multi-omics. We should start designing systems and tools which can handle huge amount of time-series data and further develop a secure ecosystem which can support the advancement of precision medicine.
Margareta Haag, President of the Swedish Network against cancer bought forth the concerns and frustrations of cancer patients who find it extremely difficult to access and benefit from precision medicine. Personalized treatment options are unfortunately not yet available to all cancer patients. Margareta emphasized that patients are keen to participate in research and development of precision medicine.
Results from clinical trials such as IMPRESS (Norway), MegaLiT (Sweden), DRUP (Netherlands) has emphasized the need for creating a collaborative arena and joining forces internationally. Government strategies will play a pivotal role in scaling such trials which can make precision medicine accessible to more patients.
Who are we and where are we going…
At Vitae Evidence we are building a decision support tool that can harness the powerful combination of human and machine intelligence to find evidence-based, actionable insights. Our tool is a secure, cloud-based medical device software that combines text-mining, natural language processing, rule-based and case-based reasoning to harvest information from scientific and real-world data. Harnessing the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we are building a collaborative system that enables continuous learning.
We are looking for innovative clinics and research centers, eHealth partners and cutting-edge clinicians to pilot our SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. We would love for you to Join us on our mission to make personalised medicine available to all.
About the Author
Jimita Toraskar, PhD in Medicine, works as a hybrid scientist trained in both digital technologies and molecular data analysis. In her daily activities, while working on real-world cases, she teaches AI by specifying the scientific rules of the software and controlling the evidence of extracted biomedical insights thus, enabling more powerful features to be embedded in the Vitae Evidence software.
