Phase III of Singapore’s National Precision Medicine Program has launched, with aims of enrolling up to 450,000 inhabitants to form a genomic database and biobank and to deliver precision medicine at population scale within the healthcare system.
The project Precision Health Research, Singapore, also known as PRECISE, was established to coordinate Singapore’s national effort to implement precision medicine across the healthcare system.
In addition to boosting the number of participants in the genomic database, Phase III aims to assess how precision medicine can be rolled out successfully in Singapore’s healthcare system. One example will be looking at the cost-effectiveness and the clinical impact of adding genomic information into routine healthcare practice.
“In Phase III, we will work with individuals receiving medical treatments and clinical services, including those with specific disease conditions. This will allow important studies to better understand how genomic information may be used to support improved health outcomes,” said Patrick Tan, MD, PhD, a professor at Duke-NUS Medical School and executive director of PRECISE, in a press statement about the launch.
“Importantly, Phase III is about understanding and addressing the practical challenges of integrating precision medicine into clinical care in a thoughtful, sustainable, and equitable way.”
PRECISE began in 2017 with the launch of Phase I of the project, which recruited and sequenced 10,000 primarily healthy volunteers from across the different major ethnic groups in Singapore, namely, Chinese, Malay, and Indian people.
The project is a public–private partnership run primarily as a collaboration between the Singapore government and academic and clinical partners in the region, including Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and National University of Singapore and three public health clusters: the National Healthcare Group, the National University Health System, and SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. Private partners include companies providing sequencing technology and support such as Illumina, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, among others.
Phase II of the project began in 2021 and was completed earlier this year. It included the SG100K initiative that sequenced 100,000 genomes from mostly healthy volunteers from different populations across Singapore. A patient cohort of around 50,000 was also recruited for this phase including people with familial hypercholesterolemia, breast and hereditary cancers, kidney diseases, and others to look more closely at disease genetics.
Phase III of the project will run until 2031. In addition to collecting genomic information from more people and assessing how precision medicine can be rolled out on a larger scale in Singapore, it also aims to support preventive care by giving doctors and patients genetic insights that allow earlier diagnosis, followed by targeted therapies, and personalized interventions.
“Over time, as more gene-disease pairs are identified, greater awareness of how genes and genomic background can predispose some individuals to inherited conditions could encourage more preventive and timely healthcare, helping individuals make informed choices earlier,” said Tai E. Shyong, MD, a professor at the National University of Singapore and Duke-NUS Medical School and chief medical officer at PRECISE. “Insights from one patient’s data could, in turn, guide better care for the next.”
