Medicine’s next step

Health care is always personal. As science and technology have advanced, it’s become possible to make it personalized as well, giving us the tools to better understand, prevent, and treat everyone’s individual health needs.

We wouldn’t buy a pair of glasses that doesn’t match our eyesight, and though plenty of people break their arms, everyone gets fitted for their own cast. Our health care should be customized for us. The powerful and exciting field of precision medicine goes a step further and asks: What if we could just as easily match a cancer cure to a patient’s unique genetic code? Instead of trying a one-size-fits-all treatment, what if medical experts could tailor one specifically for everyone’s body?

By bringing together doctors and data like never before, precision medicine aims to deliver the right treatments in the right dosage at the right time — every time. It helps target the causes of a condition rather than just the symptoms. This is one of the greatest opportunities we’ve ever seen for new medical breakthroughs, but it only works if we collect...