The goal of reaching an era of individualized precision medicine will first require a closer look at the broader population.
The big picture: Large clinical trials and massive databases of de-identified genetic and other health information sometimes from generations of populations are offering scientists and doctors data to decipher why certain individuals have a higher risk of disease or different responses to treatments.
What's happening: There are many institutions gathering this data, including...
What's new: The COVID-19 pandemic led various groups to collectively create large-scale studies to seek safe and effective COVID treatments as rapidly as possible, such as the U.K.'s Recovery trial on more than 47,000 participants and the WHO's Solidarity Therapeutics Trial on 14,200 randomized hospitalized patients globally.
Growing awareness of the problems caused by a lack of diversity in clinical trials and in most genetic databases has led to other changes.
Reality check: Personalized medicine continues to face serious challenges, and has sometimes resulted in deadly missed targets. But many hope accumulating data from large, more diverse trials will help alleviate those issues.
Between the lines: Large cohort studies are one of the key "strategies to be able to understand the risk factors associated with cancer and with other diseases," says Marcia Cruz-Correa, physician-scientist at the University of Puerto Rico Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The bottom line: These massive datasets are expected to help tease out the biological and socioeconomic factors of disease, Oh says. "They're all tied together."
Go deeper:
Go here to see the original:
The power of massive databases and trials to unlock precision medicine - Axios
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
