MUSC brings together precision health experts to talk prevention, health equity

The 2024 Precision Health Research Symposium at the Medical University of South Carolina featured scientists sharing their research and insights with each other. The symposium, funded by the National Cancer institute, focused on ways to not only improve people’s health but also how to ensure nobody is left behind and how to prevent avoidable problems.

The theme was “Advancing equity through precision health.” Equity means ensuring everyone has the chance to be as healthy as possible.

More than 200 people came together for the Charleston symposium. They attended in person, and virtually, from multiple states and countries. 

 

Caitlin Allen, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Public Health Sciences at MUSC who focuses on precision health, led the event. She put forth a definition of precision health that came from geneticist and epidemiologist Muin Khoury., director of the Office of Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Our goal in precision health, is to provide the right intervention to the right population at the right time,” Allen said.

The symposium speakers were a mixture of health care providers, scientists and others knowledgeable about precision health and health equity.

Testing technology

Paul Heider, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Public Health Sciences at MUSC, gave a talk called “Behavioral testing for algorithmic bias identification.” Algorithms, instructions built into a decision-making process, are used in precision health calculations to help predict, diagnose and treat health conditions. They can also help with prevention. But they need to avoid bias to produce solid information.

Improving emergency response

Lior Rennert, Ph.D., directs Clemson University’s Center for Public Health Modeling and Response. He talked about the importance of targeted health policies to minimize daily life disruption during a pandemic or other public health crisis, using data and analytics to help people as safely and efficiently as possible.

“Our mission is to develop a statewide network for outbreak detection, forecasting and coordinating emergency response,” Rennert said. The network is called Disease Modeling and Analytics to Inform Outbreak Preparedness, Response, Intervention, Mitigation and Elimination, or DMA-PRIME for short. Read more about it here.

Targeting cancer                

Guilherme Del Fiol, M.D. Ph.D., is a professor and the vice chair for Research in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. He discussed identifying people eligible for genetic testing for hereditary cancer syndromes. Del Fiol said two million people have a hereditary cancer risk, but far too many don’t know it.  More than 85% learned they had that risk after they were diagnosed with cancer.

Personalizing nutrition

Another factor affecting people’s health is what they consume. Behavioral scientist Deborah Tate, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, focused on precision nutrition.

“Poor diet is a leading cause of preventable death and disease and health care costs in the U.S.,” Tate said. She said nutrition can be tailored to people’s genes, culture and environment to improve their health.

Ensuring cultural equity

A pair of Precision Health Scholarship winners spoke at the symposium as well. Dayanna Ramirez Leon and Grace Leon-Lozano talked about, respectively, recognizing hereditary cancer risks among Latinos and tailoring genetics information materials to meet people’s cultural and linguistic needs.

Precision health perceptions

Jacob Williams, a biostatistics Ph.D. candidate at MUSC, discussed the Precision Research Participation study, also known as PECAN. “Precision health is an emergent field, and individual's perceptions about participation in precision health research are not well understood. Historically, marginalized groups are underrepresented in research,” Williams said. He hopes to help change that by better understanding and addressing barriers to participation.

Precision health panel

After Williams’ talk, a panel of community leaders and experts focused on increasing the inclusion of such marginalized groups through community involvement. Tamara Bourda, Ph.D., administrator of of Health Equity at MUSC Health, led a discussion that included Lee Moultrie, community organizer and Air Force Veteran; Kim Hale, the American Cancer Society’s associate director of state partnerships; Michael Lyons, M.D., senior clinical geneticist at the Greenwood Genetic Center; and Paula Ramos, a genetic researcher from Emory University.

Pinpointing children’s conditions

An MUSC clinical assistant professor of Pediatrics brought a frontline perspective to how precision health is being used to help diagnose children’s conditions in the hospital. Genetics specialist Kristen Lancaster, M.D., said doctors are increasingly using genetic testing, especially in very sick babies and children, to figure out the best ways to care for them.

Equity in electronic research

Alison Fohner, Ph.D., a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Washington, talked about using big data methods to do electronic health record research, with the goal to improve health equity. Fohner specializes in combining in-depth electronic health record data with genetic information to personalize medicine and figure out which drugs might work best for a patient.

Equity in cancer prevention and care

Pamela Ganschow, M.D., director of Cancer Prevention and Survivorship Clinical Programs at the University of Illinois Cancer Center, focused the importance of assessing everyone who uses Federally Qualified Health Centers to see whether they have inherited a risk for cancer. The centers help people in areas that don’t have easy access to medical care and lets them pay based on a sliding scale.

Genetic testing

Finally, Jada Hamilton, Ph.D., a psychologist and co-director of the Genomics, Risk and Health Decision-Making Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, gave a talk called “Applying a mainstreaming model of hereditary cancer genetic testing to advance health equity.” Like Ganschow, Hamilton said it’s important for people to know their risk to help guide their decision-making and the decisions of their health care providers.

The symposium

The Precision Health Symposium was the latest sign of MUSC’s focus on making health care, from prevention to treatment, as individualized as possible and working with other schools, hospitals and researchers to make that happen.

 

While the vice president for Research’s office led the first MUSC Precision Health Research Symposium in 2023, this year’s event was part of the Precision Public Health Network. Launched in 2019, the network is a place for early-stage researchers focused on precision health to get training from leaders in the field and collaborate. Next year’s conference will be held in Sydney, Australia, with a focus on capacity building in precision health.

This year’s event was made possible by a Precision Public Health Network grant and supported by the MUSC Office of the Vice President for Research. The symposium was funded by NCI grant 5R13CA261073-03.