July 23, 2024—An international consortium of experts in precision medicine—a burgeoning field in which disease prevention and treatment is tailored to individuals based on their genetics, environments, and lifestyles—recently published new guidelines to improve how scientists in the field report their research findings.
The consortium was led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Paul Franks, adjunct professor of nutrition. It also included Zhila Semnani-Azad, research fellow, and Deirdre Tobias, assistant professor, also in the Department of Nutrition.
According to the consortium, precision medicine research is hampered by a lack of standards for how papers should be written. As a result, readers may have difficulty interpreting and implementing findings. Additionally, research has tended to overlook under-represented groups. “These barriers limit the positive impact that precision medicine could have on the health and well-being of those most in need,” the consortium wrote in a July 19 consensus statement in Nature Medicine.
To improve the clinical relevance of precision medicine research, the group of 23 experts developed a set of guidelines study authors can follow to communicate their research with consistency and clarity. The guidelines—called the Better Precision-data Reporting of Evidence from Clinical Intervention Studies & Epidemiology, or BePRECISE, guidelines—establish best practices for writing each section of a paper: title and abstract, background and objectives, methods, results, and discussion.
The guidelines also show researchers how to incorporate considerations of equity, inclusion, and diversity in their papers. “Authors are encouraged to address these topics in their manuscripts,” the guidelines state, including through noting study participants’ ancestry, geographic, and sociodemographic characteristics and describing “the implications of inclusion and/or exclusion of people who are understudied in precision medicine research or underserved by health services.”
“Most precision medicine research to date has been conducted in people of European ancestry, which runs the risk of worsening health disparities,” Franks said in a news article about BePRECISE from Lund University in Sweden, where he also teaches as a professor of genetic epidemiology. “The guidelines have been developed to help address this problem and enhance health equity.”
Read the Lund University article: New guidelines aim to increase accuracy in precision medicine research
Read the consortium’s consensus statement: Reporting guidelines for precision medicine research of clinical relevance: the BePRECISE checklist
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