An international consensus report on precision medicine that was published in Nature Medicine last year identified the potential for advances in diabetes prevention, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. The authors also highlighted that better evidence is needed before precision medicine can be broadly implemented into healthcare.
So far, there have been no guidelines for reporting precision medicine research. Addressing this gap, a new consortium has created guidelines that can be used to improve how precision medicine research is reported and translated into clinical practice. The guidelines, published in Nature Medicine, were developed by 23 experts and can be used for precision medicine research across many different complex diseases.
"The guidelines are not disease-specific, which means they are relevant across many areas of clinical research. Most precision medicine research to date has been conducted in people of European ancestry, which runs the risk of worsening health disparities. The guidelines have been developed to help address this problem and enhance health equity," says Paul Franks, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Lund University Diabetes Centre (LUDC), who chaired the guidelines committee.
Address the patient perspective
The committee generated consensus guidelines and a corresponding checklist that align with typical sections of scientific articles. The guidelines promote standardised data reporting that will help benchmark new evidence against existing clinical standards. The guidelines also encourage researchers to address health equity, diversity, and the patient perspective in research articles.
"There is a tremendous amount of precision medicine research that is underway, and some great examples where the research is impacting clinical practice. That research shows that precision medicine has the potential to be a practical and economically viable alternative to current practices for disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The reporting guidelines are timely and needed for efficient translation of precision medicine research into practice,” says Maria F. Gomez, Professor of Physiology at LUDC and part of the guidelines committee.
