Oliver Cann, Associate Director, Media Relations, Tel.: +41 79 799 3405; E-mail: Oliver.Cann@weforum.org

• Precision medicine, or treatment tailored to the individual patient, offers the prospect of higher-quality healthcare at lower cost, but widespread adoption will not happen overnight
• The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Precision Medicine (2011-12) has identified five key areas for action to enable precision medicine’s transformative potential. Download the full report, Preparing for Precision Medicine, at http://www.weforum.org/reports/preparing-precision-medicine
• More information about the Summit on the Global Agenda 2012 is available here: http://www.weforum.org/events/summit-global-agenda-2012More information about the Summit on the Global Agenda 2012 is available here: http://www.weforum.org/events/summit-global-agenda-2012

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 14 November 2012 –  Precision medicine, which combines established clinical parameters with molecular profiling to tailor treatment for individual patients, holds the promise of considerably better and cheaper healthcare but requires concerted multistakeholder action to fulfil its potential, a new report finds today.

Preparing for Precision Medicine, published by the Global Agenda Council on Precision Medicine, builds on the significant advances in personalized patient care that have been made in biomolecular medicine in the past 10 years by setting out key requirements for widespread adoption to be achieved.

Specifically, the report calls for the establishment of frameworks for regulating, compiling and manipulating the influx of information that can keep pace with rapid scientific discoveries by allowing:

• More incentives for innovation
• New disease classification systems that incorporate emerging molecular data
• More streamlined clinical trial regulation frameworks
• Effective data interpretation and clinical decision support (CDS)
• Stimulation of consumer interest and active patient participation

“Such an approach will deliver significant benefits but also create new challenges. For one thing, preparing for precision medicine will require collaboration between all major healthcare stakeholders – clinicians, patients, government, industry and academic institutions – on a scale previously unseen. Ensuring the success of precision medicine will require that these challenges are acknowledged and effectively addressed early on,” said Lord Darzi, Hamlyn Chair of Surgery, Imperial College London and Chair of the 2011-12 Global Agenda Council on Precision Medicine.

The Co-Chairs of the Summit on the Global Agenda 2012 are Sultan Bin Saeed Al Mansoori, Minister of Economy of the United Arab Emirates and Sami Dhaen Al Qamzi, Director-General, Department of Economic Development of the Government of Dubai.