Cancer is a leading cause of death and disability in emerging economies, accounting for 14.9% of the disease burden. Despite advances in health coverage, barriers like delayed diagnosis, unequal access to treatments, and high-cost drugs hinder better cancer care and outcomes [1-3]. Precision medicine (PM) tailors’ disease prevention and treatment by considering genetic, environmental, and lifestyle variations. In cancer care, biomarkers guide clinical decisions, improving diagnosis, treatment, and health outcomes [4]. PM improves cancer patients’ quality of life and saves resources by focusing treatments on disease characteristics, avoiding costly, low-success options [5]. Increasing evidence highlights its value, and many are advocating for PM as the standard of care in high-income and emerging economies. Patients have the right to be heard and to be informed about PM’s potential so they can make decisions that are in their best interest. Evidence increasingly supports PM in cancer treatment [6,7], with many patients understanding its value, such as optimizing treatment by testing tumours to guide it [8]. However, access to biomarker and genetic testing remains limited. Patients still encounter disparities, and there remains a need for greater patient familiarity to advocate for these advantageous technologies [9,10]. This Patient Accord aims to establish PM as the gold standard of care. It outlines PM, biomarkers, and their cancer applications; examines PM’s value and current situation in emerging economies; and reviews global and regional policies. Using critical insights from patient advocates, it identifies gaps, barriers, and challenges to PM implementation and concludes with patient-driven recommendations.
Francisco Freyría Sutcliffe, Luciana Holtz de Camargo Barros, Bruno Nascimbene, María de San Martín, Sanjeev Sharma, Araceli Fernández-Cerdeño, and Margarita Quijano-Serrano. A Patient Accord to Support the Establishment of Precision Medicine as the Standard of Care. Juniper Online Journal of Public Health, 9(4). 555768. DOI: 10.19080/JOJPH.2025.09.555768
Keywords: Precision medicine; Genomic research; Patient-centered care; Genetic testing; Healthcare access; Policy advocacy; Affordable healthcare; Policy advocacy