Cutting edge R&D in the medical and health sciences appears to show great promise. Of these, developments in precision medicine has thrown up the potential to, in the words of the Singapore National Precision Medicine Strategy, benefit groups and individuals through early detection, refined diagnoses and tailored treatment.
We have had announcements such as the introduction of the HEALIX platform to consolidate healthcare data and the SG100K initiative launched to log the blueprint of 100,000 participants through time, specifically with the aim of understanding interactions of the genome with the environment in the Asian context.
These are welcome, but one area that warrants attention is how gender affects health and illness. This goes beyond OBGYN conditions. I brought up in this House previously how researchers now know the same condition can present differently in men and women. As a TIME article notes, “women are not just smaller men”, and while progress has been made, there’s still a long way to go. Apart from reacting differently to medication and vaccines, there remain significant gaps in areas such as autoimmune disorders – which affect women more – and also mental health, where for example, women are more likely to suffer from PTSD but most preclinical studies on treatment were on men.
I would thus like to seek an update from the Minister about whether and how our efforts in personalised medicine will also cater to these gender gaps in medical research and treatment.
Additionally, for precision medicine to fulfil its promise, it must go beyond collecting and analysing data, to deliver real, tangible benefits to patients, and possibly even be used as tools to tackle concerns about ageing demographics and increasing care costs. A data-driven approach is valuable, but it should serve as an enabler, not an endpoint.
And while we move towards turning research into more effective treatments with fewer side effects such as precision gene therapies, these treatments remain expensive, raising concerns about inaccessibility, which would only accelerate as the field advances. Aside from increasing inclusivity in research, our health systems need to cater to the risks of inadvertently leading to greater disparities.
I would thus like to seek clarification from the Minister about the plans to ensure that advances in precision medicine translate into real benefits for those who need them most.
Singapore has the potential to make great strides and lead in precision medicine, but leadership is measured not by infrastructure alone, but participating in global research, increasing our ability to develop and test new treatments, and most importantly, ensuring the accessibility of these advancements to all Singaporeans. We have to move beyond data collection to implementation, working to make the promise of precision medicine a reality for patients.
