Opinion Editorial: Precision Medicine will lead to Precision Policy - CanPath - Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health

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Opinion Editorial: Precision Medicine will lead to Precision Policy

Posted September 9, 2019

Discoveries from Canada’s largest health data collection project point to huge potential for precision medicine to be used with targeted policies.

New evidence could help Canadian scientists and policy-makers transform how chronic diseases are treated. Last spring, Canadian researchers found unequivocal evidence that environmental exposure has a significantly stronger impact than ancestry on the regulation of genes and their impact on disease. The discovery came out of one of the largest studies yet to examine the relationship between genetics and environmental stimuli, and the data paves the way for precision medicine and targeted policies to be used together to support healthy living.

I was a researcher in the study, which examined more than 1.6 million data points from biological specimens, health questionnaires and environmental exposures of people living in Montreal, Quebec City and Saguenay, Quebec.

Click here to read the op-ed by Professor Philip Awadalla, national scientific director of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project, published on September 9, 2019 in Policy Options, a digital magazine for Canadian policy-makers.