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. 2024 Jul 4;23(1):134.
doi: 10.1186/s12939-024-02202-7.

Precision medicine in Australia: indigenous health professionals are needed to improve equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

Dawn Alison Lewis  1   2 , Tala Mitchell  2 , Emma Kowal  3
Affiliations

Precision medicine in Australia: indigenous health professionals are needed to improve equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

Dawn Alison Lewis et al. Int J Equity Health. .

Abstract

Precision medicine, also known as "personalised medicine", seeks to identify strategies in the prevention and treatment of disease informed by a patient's genomic information. This allows a targeted approach to disease identification with the intention of reducing the burden of illness. Currently, both the emerging field of precision medicine and the established field of clinical genetics are highly reliant on genomic databases which are fraught with inbuilt biases, particularly from sample populations. The inequities of most concern here are those affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (or Zenadth Kes) peoples of Australia (hereafter, respectfully, Indigenous Australians). It is with this perspective that the Summer internship forINdigenous peoples inGenomics Australia endeavours to support the development of culturally appropriate genomic research with Indigenous Australians. We argue here that Indigenous researchers are best placed to create the informed, culturally safe environment necessary for Indigenous Australians to participate in genomic research.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors TM and DAL are Aboriginal Australian women. TM is a Yorta-Yorta and Wemba-Wemba woman with a nursing background, holding postgraduate qualifications in genetic counselling and public health and is the SING Australia coordinator. DAL is a Woolwonga doctoral candidate in Indigenous Genomics at the University of Adelaide and is the research assistant for SING Australia. EK is a Jewish-Polish-Australian woman with a background in clinical medicine and public health, currently Professor of Anthropology at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

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