The two largest determinants of health are the zip code and credit scores. What does that have to do with precision medicine and genetics?

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In 2016, the Precision Medicine Initiative was launched in the US. $130 million was allocated to NIH to build a national, large-scale research participant group, called a cohort, and $70 million was allocated to the National Cancer Institute to lead efforts in cancer genomics as part of PMI for Oncology.

Big data in the space of genomics combined with AI hold a lot of hope on prevention and more effective disease treatments. Genes are seen as a map to people’s health and diseases; the ultimate source of our health problems and wellbeing. Expectations of what could be explained with genetic testing are high. Nonetheless, genes are still a universe of the unknown.

The current reality is that large a lot of gathered data is not actionable yet.

What are the latest developments in precision medicine? Listen to Episode 9 of Faces of digital health with Dr. Subha Madhavan, the Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center in the States. She is active in several national and international research projects, and one of her latest projects is a partnership with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine safety.

The discussion in the podcast resolves around the current state of precision medicine, what genes have to do with credit scores and zip codes and affordability of precision medicine drugs since they apply to small samples of patients and are incredibly high priced.

Some question addressed:

• What is the difference between precision and personalized medicine?

• Can we afford precision medicine?

• What are the results of the US investments in precision medicine acceleration?

• Can we already see results of precision medicine to decrease adverse drug effects?

• . Most often precision medicine is mentioned in debates around cancer treatments. Where else does has it shown the greatest potentials?

• Can findings from clinical trials with very strict data gathering designs be applicable to the real world?

You can find, listen and subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Podbean, or use the RSS feed.

To learn more about the state of genetic testing, listen to Episode 9 of Medicine Today on digital health and a discussion with Sooraj Ratnakumar — a scientist with a PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge and the CEO of Swagene — an Indian company for medical genetics on how much information about individuals health can we extract from genetic data.