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Personalized profiles for disease risk must capture all facets of health

To provide individual care and prevent disease, we need to go beyond genetics in risk scores and include metrics that follow a person’s changing environment and health.
  1. Mark McCarthy

    1. Mark McCarthy is executive director of Human Genetics at Genentech, South San Francisco, California, USA.

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  2. Ewan Birney

    1. Ewan Birney is deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK.

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cartoon of a patient sitting neglected in the background while a doctor examines a panel with multicoloured dots

Credit: David Parkins

Providing the best possible care for an individual means having a better understanding of their risks of developing disease. The goal is to have personalized answers when people need to know whether, for instance, preventive surgery makes sense, a given medicine is likely to be risky or a certain diet should be recommended.

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Nature 597, 175-177 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02401-0

Disclaimer: M.M.’s views in this article are his own and not those of Genentech.

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Competing Interests

M.M. is an employee of Genentech and holds stocks and shares in Roche. E.B. is a paid consultant and equity holder of Oxford Nanopore, a paid consultant to Dovetail, and a non-executive director of Genomics England, a limited company wholly owned by the UK Department of Health and Social Care.

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