Potential UK – India collaborations in precision medicine

Earlier this month, I joined the UK Science & Innovation Network as Adviser. I’m based in the British Deputy High Commission, Mumbai. It’s been a few weeks now since I started and I’ve already made peace with Mumbai’s hectic pace. One of the themes I will be exploring this year is precision medicine.

It’s an exciting topic in the global health scene, to say the least. Essentially, precision medicine is personalised or stratified therapy to improve the treatment effectiveness based on a patient’s unique genetic characteristics, lifestyle, health history, and diet. The origin of precision medicine lies in the advances made in the field of biotechnology including gene sequencing and big data. In order to optimise the treatment decision, doctors usually rely on a patient’s diagnostic data including blood tests, imaging, physiological characteristics, genetic and molecular diagnosis. The data collected from the diagnostic tests plays an important role in assessing the accurate, safe and cost effective treatment options, diagnosis and prevention tactics.

Precision medicine is in contrast to “one size fits all” approach, which develops treatment and prevention methods for the average population, with little to no consideration for the genetic differences between individuals.

I was fascinated to learn about the UK’s initiatives and institutions in precision medicine. The UK government has invested more than £1 billion in building infrastructure for precision medicine research. One of the most interesting establishments I came across was the UK’s Precision Medicine Catapult (PMC). Launched in April 2015, it is supported by Innovate UK. The PMC is headquartered in Cambridge with six regional centres of excellence located in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. Each regional centre facilitates collaborative research and brings together academic, clinical and professional expertise to improve health outcomes globally. The Cambridge centre offers expertise in core areas such as data analytics, clinical trials, regulatory affairs, healthcare economics, and business services.

Another noteworthy initiative is the Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform (SMIP), a five year programme with nine themes designed to promote the development and use of stratified medicine in the UK. SMIP has attracted an investment of £200 million from seven renowned organisations such as Innovate UK, Medical Research Council, Department of Health- Scottish Government Health Directorates, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, Cancer Research UK and Arthritis Research UK.

In addition to the above, Innovate UK has come up with an exciting investment opportunity of up to £1 million in stratified medicine via the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme. KTP aims to support the uptake of stratified medicine in the UK across bioinformatics, systems biology, health economics and analytical algorithms.

Well, any technological advancement runs into a unique set of challenges and this applies to precision medicine too. The success of precision medicine will be dependent on a patient’s genomic and molecular data. Developing countries such as India could potentially generate tremendous volumes of such data. This is quite feasible keeping in mind India’s population, number of patients and forward looking policies of the current government. Such data would help researchers, academicians and clinicians in India and abroad to study disease wise genetic variations, and develop treatments thereof.

Later this year, we will be organising activities in this area. For the latest, watch this space.