By Daryl Pritchard
EDITOR’S NOTE: As a membership-based nonprofit institution dedicated to the advancement of personalized medicine, the Personalized Medicine Coalition is working to widen the clinical adoption of the tools and technologies that make personalized medicine possible. The appended essay is designed to provide Inside Precision Medicine’s readers with an update on the Coalition’s progress, which began with the launch of its Implementing Precision Oncology (IPO) initiative in 2022.
The Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC)’s Implementing Precision Oncology (IPO) initiative began on October 31, 2022, when the Coalition and its partners from Diaceutics and Reservoir Communications published a landmark article in JCO Precision Oncology to document the scope and complexity of clinical practice gaps in personalized medicine.
Twenty years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, this paper provided the first in-depth look at the efforts of the United States’ health systems to deploy potentially paradigm-shifting drugs that can be used to target specific genetic vulnerabilities in cancer cells. The study focused on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), where more than 70 percent of tumors have genetic alterations known to have outsized effects in driving tumor growth.
The findings showed that genetically targeted medicines reached fewer than 40 percent of patients who were diagnosed with metastatic NSCLC in 2019, with the attrition resulting from inconsistent testing and treatment practices.
Genetically guided personalized medicine can make a big difference for patients with lung cancer. Research indicates, for example, that individuals with lung tumors containing mutations in genes known as EGFR and ALK, for example, live longer when they receive genetically targeted therapies. If patients are not being presented with genetically informed testing and treatment options, they are being unknowingly denied therapeutic possibilities that could help them live longer, healthier lives.
But today’s overworked clinicians cannot be expected to keep themselves up to date on all aspects of personalized medicine, where a breakneck pace of scientific progress is being further accelerated by the increased use of AI technologies. To support the delivery of personalized medicine, health system administrators must establish policies, procedures, and IT systems that help practicing physicians navigate the complexities of the evolving testing and treatment landscape.
Through its IPO initiative, PMC publishes peer-reviewed research designed to inform the efforts of administrators and clinicians who want to improve their institutions’ practices related to personalized medicine. The Coalition and its member-research teams have published a quantitative instrument that can be used to benchmark their institutions’ progress toward the clinical integration of personalized medicine, as well as a list of strategies that can be employed to close clinical practice gaps in personalized medicine.
The Coalition’s latest IPO initiative study, titled “Improvements in Clinical Care Associated With Integration of Personalized Medicine,” analyzes data provided by six institutions within three regional health systems. The data show that institutions with higher scores on a multi-factorial assessment of personalized medicine integration are more consistently matching patients with genetically guided treatment options. The findings suggest that by boosting their institutions’ personalized medicine integration scores, health system executives and clinicians in the United States can improve the quality of care they are able to provide to American patients.
For more information about PMC’s work on the IPO initiative, please contact Senior Vice President of Science Policy Daryl Pritchard, PhD, at [email protected].
