New Guidelines Promote More Precise Precision Medicine 

Precision medicine involves tailoring care to each patient to produce the best possible outcome by taking into account a variety of factors, such as genetics, environment, lifestyle, etc. Until recently, there were no standardized guidelines for reporting precision medicine research—making it difficult to evaluate the quality of evidence due to heterogeneity and varied research methods in the field. 

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the new guidelines were developed by the BePRECISE (Better Precision-data Reporting of Evidence from Clinical Intervention Studies & Epidemiology) consortium in a bid to improve accuracy, safety, and health equity in the field of precision medicine. The guidelines are intended to be used with existing checklists such as CONSORT, STROBE, and STORMS. 

The report reviewed 16 systematic reviews that together included more than 100,000 individual research papers and found poor standardization across the studies and gaps in key information required to validate and interpret the findings.

To improve reporting, the BePRECISE Checklist comprises 23 practical recommendations organized into five sections reflective of the way scientific papers are typically organized into sections. The recommendations include adding the keyword “precision medicine” in a paper’s title or abstract to make it easier for clinicians and researchers to access; including population descriptors such as ancestry, geographic, and sociodemographic characteristics for all study participants; describing study design elements relevant to precision medicine; including statistical tests and results for subgroup comparisons; and outlining how the research in question could potentially be translated to the clinic.  

The Checklist also includes a section on health equity, emphasizing the importance of involvement and engagement from patients and the public and of including underrepresented and undeserved communities in precision medicine research. “We believe that precision medicine research should place emphasis on the development of solutions for people in greatest need, regardless of who or where they are,” wrote the authors.

The 23 global experts of the consortium hope the guidelines will be universally adopted by researchers, journal editors and reviewers, funders, etc. to better promote new research in the field, as well as better evaluate whether enough information was provided to the clinical investigators considering whether specific research is ready for clinical practice.

The BePRECISE Checklist is available at www.be-precise.org.