Overview

The Faculty of Medicine launched Precision Health in September 2021


Strategic Context

Growing from the Faculty of Medicine’s (FoM) Building the Future: 2016-2021 Research Objective 4 to enhance our leadership in precision health, we aim to advance Research Strategy 1 in our updated strategic plan, Building the Future: 2021-2026, which is to catalyze innovation and excellence in foundational, clinical and health systems to enhance precision and population health. 

To set our course towards enhancing our leadership in precision health (PH), we scanned the PH landscape at UBC to learn about the range of PH-related activities underway. The results of the landscape scan are summarized in the Precision Health Positions and Priorities Report.  

READ THE REPORT  

We are focused on advancing three priorities identified in the report:

  1. Facilitate collaboration and coordination of PH activities by creating a PH structure through which the Faculty can set PH direction and enable physical and virtual collaboration.
  2. Through the PH structure and core platforms, identify and support areas of existing, unique strength within PH as well as emerging areas where we have the potential to collectively lead the field; and
  3. Strengthen, maintain, and build inter-Faculty collaboration, in particular with the Faculties of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Land and Food Systems, Applied Science, Science, Law, Arts, and the School of Business.

What is Precision Health?

Precision Health is an individualized approach to maximizing health that engages patients* and leverages genomic and other ‘omic, biomarker, environment, and/or socioeconomic information about a person to identify and implement a range of prevention and/or treatment actions, at the patient-, population-, and/or policy level.

*Includes healthy individuals, population groups and/or communities.

Goal

Led by Dr. Stuart Turvey, we are implementing UBC FoM Precision Health, which is designed to enable collaboration, prioritize PH research, and support PH research through offering annual symposiums, creating a PH website, and awarding catalyst grants. Precision Health was previously led by Dr. Christopher Carlsten.

What will UBC FoM Precision Health achieve?

Some of the challenges heard through the landscape scan included:

  • Many researchers are not fully aware of other PH-related activities underway or of others working in similar fields and would appreciate greater opportunities for collaboration
  • Opportunities to enhance our leadership in PH may be missed due to the lack of a mechanism in place to prioritize PH research based on areas of strength and potential leadership
  • The importance of directly supporting more and innovative PH research is a key aspect of enhancing PH leadership

To advance the three priorities and address these current challenges, UBC FoM Precision Health aims to achieve the following functions:

  • Enable Collaboration: Collaboration means researchers working together, in person and/or online, at some or all stages of the research lifecycle;
  • Prioritize PH Research: Prioritize means identifying and targeting areas of strength in which we can capitalize on current leadership, and emerging areas where there is an opportunity to step forward as a leader; and
  • Support PH Research: Support means enabling PH research with funding and tools to advance specific PH initiatives.

Three synergistic components that will fulfil these necessary functions are annual symposiums, a PH website, and catalyst grants.

Implementation

Since the launch of UBC FoM Precision Health, we have successfully implemented the inaugural PH symposium, the PH website, and the PH catalyst grant competition.