Editor's Note

Abstract

Inside Precision MedicineVol. 9, No. 3 EditorialFree AccessEditor's NotePublished Online:18 Jun 2022https://doi.org/10.1089/ipm.09.03.01AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Often referred to as the doctor's doctor, pathologists have been practicing precision medicine through the lens of the microscope for over a century - identifying, characterizing and reporting on the disease in question, in order that an appropriate course of treatment can be pursued. The practice hasn't changed demonstrably over this period until recent years, where we have seen an incremental movement from analogue into a digitized, high definition ecosystem, powered by artificial intelligence. In this issue we explore how the advent of digital pathology will not only improve efficiencies of scale, save time, reduce workloads, create more precise and accurate diagnoses, but will provide insights that will ultimately pave the way for a deeper pipeline of targeted therapeutic candidates.We look at how academic centers are using this new technology and are leveraging the opportunities and indeed tackling the limitations of implementing these systems across hospital networks. Ultimately, change takes time - logistics, business strategy and varying pathology approaches between an academic or a community setting need to be reconciled in order to find a way to harmonize working practices and also create standardization and interoperability of disparate IT systems. We will need high volumes of training data in order to teach the systems, certainly in the case of cancer, to detect the seemingly limitless permutations of pathways involved in tumor heterogeneity that we now know exist.Even more fundamental of course, is the need for diversity and ensuring the data is representative of the populations healthcare systems serve. As Josh Denny articulates, collection of diverse data sets has been the most compelling aspect of the All of Us project and will prove indispensable to researchers who are looking to find the answers to a host of intractable diseases, providing the clues to linkages between ethnicity and disease risk. At the root of the issue is education concerning biological variation, if we can start to lay down the foundations of creating a new racial taxonomy of disease for all ethnicities at the curriculum stage, I firmly believe we can create that necessary sea change over the ensuing decades.As we discover in our book review, Deepak Asudani and his two children Ananya and Aarnav have written the first of a series of books with the purpose of educating children (possibly our future physicians, scientists and healthcare leaders) about genetics and the impact it has on our lives. Continued interrogation of genetic variation between ethnicities through more expansive genomic studies in non European ancestry is critical and will have profound effects in delivering inclusive and equitable healthcare for all.Damian DohertyEditor in ChiefFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 9Issue 3Jun 2022 InformationCopyright © GEN PublishingTo cite this article:Editor's Note.Inside Precision Medicine.Jun 2022.3-3.http://doi.org/10.1089/ipm.09.03.01Published in Volume: 9 Issue 3: June 18, 2022PDF download