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I took a bread baking class. This is what I learned about precision medicine.
When President Obama announced his Precision Medicine Initiative at his State of the Union address in 2015, I wondered whether he had questioned the wording and knew what he was promising.
The National Institutes of Health describe precision medicine as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. This approach will allow doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people. It is in contrast to a one-size-fits-all approach, in which disease treatment and prevention strategies are developed for the average person, with less consideration for the differences between individuals.”
Precision medicine assumes that data can predict the success of a treatment for individual patients beyond what works best for them as a group. It assumes that doctors know and agree on what is the success of a treatment and that factors can be identified that increase the likelihood the treatment will work for a patient. If data need to support treatment decisions, then the precision medicine approach also assumes that the success of alternative treatments can be predicted as well and that the…
