Advancing precision medicine in a societally equitable and beneficial way means ensuring that all healthcare systems can adopt the most scientifically and technologically appropriate approaches to a more targeted and personalized way of screening, diagnosing and treating disease. The World Economic Forum’s Leapfrogging with Precision Medicine project will develop a set of tools and case studies demonstrating how a precision medicine approach in countries with greenfield policy spaces can potentially transform their healthcare delivery and outcomes.

The Opportunity

Participating in this project will help partners and stakeholders elucidate foundational elements necessary to develop a precision medicine-ready healthcare system in an emerging economy context, and the necessary policies to support the development and sustainability of these elements. Participants will be able to host or join different pilots in different countries.

This project currently has three active workstreams developing the following outputs:

Workstream 1: Genomic Data Policy and Ethics – A framework on genomic data policy, addressing the topics of consent, privacy, data access, and benefit sharing, as well as tools to help address the ethical tensions inherent in these topics. This workstream aims to support the creation of forward looking policies that reduce the potential risks to populations in low- and middle- income countries caused by the acceleration of genomic data collection. Please see the resources shared on this page.  

Workstream 2: Precision Medicine Readiness Principles – A living document where policy-makers and others looking to advance precision medicine can find benchmarks for readiness. This will be developed as a roadmap that identifies distinguishing precision medicine capabilities denoting different tiers of readiness and categories of criteria for progress. This will be tested and iterated over through material pilots, beginning with a hospital system partnership on integrating precision medicine approaches into care delivery.

Anchor project: A case study on genetic education and diagnostic capacity building for cancer care in Rwanda. This project is designed to demonstrate precision medicine approaches for systems with rising rates of NCDs

Impact

The Leapfrogging with Precision Medicine project will enable the testing of scalable mechanisms to support design, implementation and evaluation of precision medicine in emerging economies. Enabling precision medicine in such contexts, potentially by leapfrogging existing or prevailing practices, means that vastly more people will have access to personalized treatments designed to improve outcomes, and streamline and reduce costs.