The BePRECISE consortium has published guidelines aimed at improving the accuracy, safety, and health equity in precision medicine. These are all critical issues in the field that have been largely overlooked. The paper appears in Nature Medicine and the lead author is Siew S. Lim, of Health Systems and Equity at Monash University.
Diversity in particular has been hard to address: In 2021, researchers estimated the proportion of samples from individuals of European ancestry they included in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) was 86.3 percent.
BePRECISE stands for “Better Precision-data Reporting of Evidence from Clinical Intervention Studies & Epidemiology.” It comprises a group of experts based in low-, middle- and high-income countries dedicated to improving the reporting standards of precision medicine research. These include 23 specialists in precision medicine, cardiometabolic diseases, statistics, editorial, and lived experience.
The consortium encourages researchers, reviewers, funders and editors to adopt its guidelines to promote equitable clinical implementation of precision medicine. The checklist is expected to enhance the quality and comparability of precision medicine studies, fostering advancements in healthcare for all. It is available at www.be-precise.org.
The checklist comprises 23 items organized into five sections that align with typical sections of a scientific publication. A specific section about health equity aims to encourage precision medicine research to be inclusive of individuals and communities that are traditionally underrepresented in clinical research and/or underserved by health systems.
The group says it seeks to advance precision medicine by promoting transparency, inclusivity, and high-quality research practices.
For example, the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at the University of the Witwatersrand conducts research on Africa’s genetic heritage. Their team aims to create an African Genomics research hub with a focus on strengthening the continent’s capacity to analyze large genome, transcriptome and epigenomic datasets for the purpose of promoting a precision medicine approach in Africa.
“Africa and its people will contribute to global solutions in the field of precision medicine by virtue of their unique genetic diversity and challenging environments. They should not be left behind, but potential benefits will require generating and sharing research data and reporting outcomes according to international best practices,” said Michèle Ramsay, director of SBIMB, a member of the BePRECISE consortium that developed the guidelines, and a co-author of the paper.
She added that,”The BePRECISE checklist is an important tool to ensure that research studies can be compared, and similarities and differences accurately evaluated, to avoid a one-size-fits-all misfit for African populations.”
Chair of the guidelines committee, Paul Franks, Lund University, Sweden, said, “Precision medicine seeks to tailor healthcare to individual characteristics, accounting for the heterogeneous [dissimilar] nature of diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, mental health disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and infectious diseases. However, this heterogeneity, combined with varied research methodologies, has created challenges in comparing studies and implementing findings across the field.”
