Rethinking Pharmacogenomics Education Beyond Health Professionals: Addressing the “Know-Do” Gap Across the Personalized Medicine Innovation Ecosystem

Predicting individual response to drug therapy has long been a goal of personalized medicine in every therapeutic area. The mapping of the human genome and subsequent advancements in genetic technology had raised the public expectation that personalized drug therapy would come sooner than later. However, with barriers and logistical challenges existing at multiple levels, achieving this goal remains years away. Knowledge gap in healthcare professionals has always been cited as a significant barrier in clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics. Yet, to overcome the spectrum of challenges and for personalized medicine to succeed, there needs to be a rethinking of expanding the educational scope to include all stakeholders within the personalized medicine innovation ecosystem, rather than “narrowly” focusing on simply educating current and future health practitioners. Personalized medicine can only be achieved with all stakeholders in the field, under the rubric of a vision of a “knowledge ecosystem”, working together, and occasionally accepting a paradigm change in their current approaches to implementation. If postgenomics personalized medicine is to embrace systems pharmacology as a core tenet, it seems essential that such broader vision should be extended to field of education as well.