President Obama’s settled the score on this one: It’s precision medicine. Not personalized medicine.
The life sciences community has been throwing around both terms, but there’s actually a keen distinction between the two.
Personalized medicine’s origins coincide with the wrapping up of the Human Genome Project, and denote a sort of tailored-t0-you panacea – it’s all about the individual’s genetic profile.
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Precision medicine, on the other hand, casts a wider net. It’s hones in on certain populations, finding the genetic threads that interweave certain patients and develops treatments that are applicable to entire groups.
This debate’s been ongoing for more than a decade, but there’s been a recent lean towards precision medicine. Luke Timmerman outlined the background quite nicely in a 2013 piece for Xconomy:
Momentum for this renaming effort came from Stephen Galli, the chair of pathology at Stanford University, according to fellow NRC committee member Maynard Olson of the University of Washington. Olson, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, says he was quickly persuaded by Galli’s argument. The gist is that personalized medicine has largely been associated with single anecdotal success stories. Those kinds of advances are extremely valuable if they happen to a member of your family, and they can make for great experiments that generate new scientific hypotheses, like the work Mike Snyder has done at Stanford.
Given that this piece is two years old, this clearly has been a long-standing point of contention – but “personalized medicine” has remained strong in life sciences jargon.
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Til now. Thanks to Obama’s new precision medicine initiative, that’s how the public is going to refer to personalized medicine and individualized medicine (and probably genomics, too).
So, thanks, Obama. Now we know.