China Embraces Precision Medicine on a Massive Scale

Formidable capacity in genome sequencing, access to millions of patients and the promise of solid governmental support: those are the assets that China hopes to bring to the nascent field of precision medicine, which uses genomic, physiological and other data to tailor treatments to individuals.

Almost exactly one year after US President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative, China is finalizing plans for its own, much larger project. But as universities and sequencing companies line up to gather and analyse the data, some observers worry that problems with the nation’s health-care infrastructure — in particular a dearth of doctors — threaten the effort’s ultimate goal of improving patient care.

Precision medicine harnesses huge amounts of clinical data, from genome sequences to health records, to determine how drugs affect people in different ways. By enabling physicians to target drugs only to those who will benefit, such knowledge can cut waste, improve health outcomes using existing treatments, and inform drug development. For example, it is now clear that individuals with a certain mutation (which is mostly found...