DOHA: Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, attended a panel discussion focusing on laying the foundations for personalized medicine in clinical practice, as Qatar Foundation’s Qatar Precision Health Institute was officially launched.
The discussion at Education City, moderated by Dr Wadha Al-Muftah, Senior Director, Qatar Genome, at Qatar Precision Health Institute (QPHI), brought together experts and leaders from across Qatar’s health sector to discuss how the country’s efforts to adopt personalized medicine practices are being supported, the implementation of precision health mechanisms in clinical care, and ways of enhancing cooperation and knowledge exchange within the field of healthcare, to bridge gaps between research, practice, and clinical application.
Among those who participated was Dr Salha Bujassoum, Senior Medical Oncologist at Hamad Medical Corporation's (HMC) National Centre for Cancer Care and Research, and Assistant Chair of the Precision Medicine Committee at HMC, who discussed the importance of precision health applications in the early detection of cancer.
“Tumors are one of the most common genetic diseases – 95 per cent of them constitute genetic diseases in affected organs,” she said. “Through cooperation with other scientific institutions, such as QPHI’s Qatar Biobank and the Qatar Genome Programme, we are now treating the disease before it occurs through proactive measures.
“All participants in Qatar Biobank in whom genetic mutations that cause cancer were discovered were referred to us to take certain precautions to prevent contracting the disease before symptoms appear. Precision health is not only for treatment but also for prevention.”
Dr Jassim Al Suwaidi, Senior Consultant Cardiologist and Chief of Scientific, Academic and Faculty Affairs at HMC, emphasized the relationship between genes and heart disease – the main cause of death for both men and women – and spoke about how genetic analysis uses a person’s genetic information to determine the appropriate drug they should receive, in the appropriate dose, at the appropriate time.
“For patients who suffer from heart attacks and strokes, we usually give them platelet inhibitors, which is a type of medication, but they may not respond to certain medications if they have a particular type of genetic mutation,” he explained. “In cooperation with the Qatar Genome Programme, we discovered that up to 30 per cent of patients have this mutation.”
Dr Tawfig Ben Omran, Division Chief of Genetics and Genomic Medicine at QF's Sidra Medicine, discussed the importance of precision health in driving a shift from traditional healthcare that treats symptoms and clinical disease, to advanced healthcare that treats patients according to their genetic makeup.
“This was not available before the existence of genome sequencing,” he said. “For example, spinal muscular atrophy is a relatively common disease in children in the first year of their lives, and we were previously forced to tell parents that this disease is incurable and that the only treatment available is rehabilitation, physical and occupational therapy.
“But today, we have three gene treatments, and from this disease being an incurable one that causes early death, we are now seeing children living normal lives.”
Dr Mariam Abdelmalik, Managing Director of the Primary Health Care Corporation, highlighted initiatives based on adopting precision health, and how doctors in primary health care centres can be supported to implement it.
“We have worked to strengthen cooperation between the doctors of the Primary Health Care Corporation and specialized care to train doctors,” she said. “This enables them to deal with diseases as soon as they are discovered and educates them on how to inform patients about their health condition, while we have also developed initiatives to implement protocols and guidelines.
“A working team was also formed to manage analytical data through health information systems, study each case after an early diagnosis is made, and assess how to link it with specialized clinics. Together with the electronic transfer initiative linking Hamad Hospital and the Primary Health Care Corporation, this has had a great impact in enabling us to review cases.”
The discussion was followed by a presentation focusing on the role of Artificial Intelligence in enhancing healthcare practices and applications, introduced by Dr Hamdi Mbarek, Director of Research and Partnerships, QPHI, and given by leading geneticist and cancer researcher Professor Yusuke Nakamura, President of the National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health, and Nutrition (NIBIOHN), Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago.
