A University of Virginia School of Medicine scientist and other top experts from around the world have developed the first comprehensive guidelines for reporting cutting-edge "precision medicine" research in a bid to improve patient care and health equity for people everywhere. Precision medicine aims to tailor treatments to individual patients to get the best possible outcomes. It does this by considering many different factors specific to the patient, such as the patient's genetics, environment, lifestyle and more.
But until now there have been no standardized guidelines for reporting precision medicine research, hindering progress. The inaugural reporting guidelines have been published in the leading clinical medicine journal, Nature Medicine . The paper from the BePRECISE (Better Precision-data Reporting of Evidence from Clinical Intervention Studies & Epidemiology) consortium details comprehensive guidelines aimed at improving the accuracy, safety and health equity in precision medicine.
One of the key architects of the plan was UVA's Stephen S. Rich, PhD, of the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Public Health Genomics. Precision medicine is becoming reality in both research and in clinical practice, yet there have not been guidelines on how research in precision medicine is reported.
Without standards of reporting, it is difficult to determine the quality of the evidence from research and whether it really is fundamentally sound and ready for trans.