Multidisciplinary Effort to Drive Precision-Medicine for the Future

Abstract

In the past one or two decades, countries across the world have successively implemented different precision medicine (PM) programs, and also cooperated to implement international PM programs. We are now in the era of PM. Singapore's National Precision Medicine (NPM) program, initiated in 2017, is now entering its second phase to generate a large genomic database for Asians. The National University of Singapore (NUS) also launched its own PM translational research program (TRP) in 2021, aimed at consolidating multidisciplinary expertise within the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine to develop collaborative projects that can help to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets for the realization of PM. To achieve this, appropriate data collection, data processing, and results interpretation must be taken into consideration. There may be some difficulties during these processes, but with the improvement of relevant rules and the continuous development of omics-based technologies, we will be able to solve these problems, eventually achieving precise prediction, diagnosis, treatment, or even prevention of diseases.

Keywords: big data; data collection; data processing; healthcare; metabolic disease; omics technologies; precision medicine; results interpretation.

Figure 1

Workflow of PM. The typical workflow of PM involves three parts: data collection, which is done by clinician-scientists; data processing, which is done by geneticists and data scientists; results interpretation, which is done by basic biologists and doctors (created with BioRender.com).