Special journal issue on pediatric genomic medicine

Clinical Therapeutics (CT) is seeking papers for a specialty topic update on value, implementation, and access to pediatric genomic medicine. This themed section will be co-edited by Tara Lavelle and Hadley Stevens Smith. Additional information about topics of interest and the journal can be found here.

If you are interested in contributing, please send Tara and Hadley an email by July 31 that includes the title, article type (original article, review, or commentary), and abstract (< 400 words) of your proposed manuscript. They will be in touch after abstracts are evaluated to communicate the deadline for the full manuscript. All invited papers will undergo rigorous peer review and will not be subject to submission fees or page charges.

Please share this Call for Papers with colleagues and students who are working on issues of value, implementation, and access to pediatric genomic medicine, as Tara and Hadley hope to recruit a diverse array of experts for this special edition.

Contact details for Tara and Hadley are as follows:

  • Tara Lavelle, PhD (tlavelle@tuftsmedicalcenter.org) | Assistant Professor, Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center
  • Hadley Stevens Smith, PhD, MPSA (hadley.smith@bcm.edu) | Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Health Policy, Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine | Incoming faculty, Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Medical School & Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute

New special theme section in Value in Health on Precision Medicine

In 2018, I contributed to the publication of a special theme section in Value in Health on assessing the value of clinical genomic testing. You can read a blog post about this publication here, and access the special issue here. My contribution to this was as a member of the Global Economics and Evaluation of Clinical Genomics Sequencing Working Group (GEECS), formerly known as the Population Genomics Health Economists Working Group.

I’m pleased to say that we have just published a second theme section in the same journal, this time focused on evaluation methods for moving precision medicine into practice and policy. This theme section features five papers from the GEECS team and one paper by the ISPOR Special Interest Group on Precision Medicine and Advanced Therapies. As before, the work was chaired by Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD.

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Just published: Value In Health theme section on assessing the value of clinical genomic testing

Around 12 months ago I joined an exciting new venture: the Population Genomics Health Economists Working Group. This group is made up of health economists and policy researchers from major institutions across the globe who have been at the forefront of the incorporation of genomics into clinical care. The group is chaired by Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD, Director of the Center for Translational and Policy Research on Personalized Medicine (TRANSPERS) at the University of California. You can find out more about the group members here.

The first key output from this working group has been published today: a themed section in the September issue of Value in Health which addresses the challenges and solutions for assessment of the value of clinical genomic testing.

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Health economics, genomics and the value of knowing

In July 2016, the Office for Health Economics and the European Personalised Medicine Association published a white paper titled: “The Value of Knowing and Knowing the Value: Improving the Health Technology Assessment of Complementary Diagnostics”. This publication did not receive a great deal of attention at the time, but it raises some interesting points related to genomic testing that are worthy of consideration by a wider audience. In particular, it highlights several things that we currently do reasonably well in health economics and genomics, as well as some areas in which we need to improve evidence generation, suggesting a future research agenda in this field.

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