What is the position of the international precision medicine community in relation to the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic?

ABSTRACT

Precision medicine can be defined as a movement of transformation of contemporary biomedicine that orients academic research activity, business models, and the development of health products and services designed individually for the user, based on patients' genetic information and other biomedical markers. In recent years, this community has been quite active in the international scientific scenario. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still not clear which positions or strategies these groups have adopted to respond to the health crisis. This article aims to understand how the international precision medicine community is reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic and the basis for their approaches and potential solutions suggested for mitigation of the negative effects from the increase in SARS-CoV-2 infections. A search was thus conducted in 28 documents from 18 selected sources, analyzing the narratives adopted by precision medicine experts in scientific articles, editorials, commentaries, perspectives, newspaper stories, newsletters and online conferences of the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC). The objective was to understand how these groups envisage a new sociotechnical configuration to respond to the pandemic and its effects.