Oracle Health Sciences has announced the findings of a study outlining current and future plans, as well as barriers, for precision medicine and its impact on life sciences and healthcare communities.

The study, conducted by GenomeWeb and sponsored by Oracle Health Sciences, included survey responses from 316 researchers from academic institutes, hospitals, medical centers, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, genomics service providers and clinical or reference labs.

Findings included:

• 62 percent of respondents researched the development of biomarker discovery or translational research. Another 12 percent plan on conducting the same research within the next two years.
• Oncology was the field where precision medicine would have the most impact. Additionally, respondents also stated cardiovascular disease, neurology and pediatrics as other possible high-impact fields.
• More than half utilized a hybrid or in-house approach to precision medicine initiatives.
• More than 72 percent of respondents from organizations with current precision medicine initiatives stated using next-generation sequencing variant panels, followed by whole genome sequencing.
• Nearly 80 percent aimed to be able to fully leverage larger, more complex datasets to identify insights and improve treatment recommendations by implementing precision medicine in the future.
• Only 18 percent found insufficient benefits to precision medicine.
• Insufficient technical structures were stated as the main barrier in advancing an organizations precision medicine initiative.

"Precision medicine is vital to advancing medicine, and critical to its success is the underlying technology needed to manage the large volumes of data it requires," said Andy Alasso, global vice president at Oracle Health Sciences. "The findings revealed that while there is widespread interest in using more complex and diverse clinical and genomics data, there is also anxiety among researchers about deficiencies in their current technical infrastructure to handle such data. This underscores the importance of platforms like Oracle Healthcare Foundation (OHF) to ensure the pace of innovation in precision medicine is not slowed by a lack of technical support."