The Contribution of Clinical Pharmacologists in Precision Medicine: An Opportunity for Health Care Improvement.

BACKGROUND

Clinical pharmacologists play an important role and have professional value in the field, especially regarding their role within precision medicine (PM) and personalized therapies.

OBJECTIVE

In this work, we sought to stimulate debate on the role of clinical pharmacologists.

METHODS

A literature review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement, through electronic consultation of 2 databases, PubMed/Medline and Embase, and Google Scholar with manual research taking into account the peer-reviewed literature such as observational studies, reviews, original research articles, comments, mini-reviews, and opinion papers published in English between 2010 and February 2020. Titles and abstracts were screened by 1 author, and studies identified for full-text analysis and selected according to inclusion criteria were agreed on by 2 reviewers.

RESULTS

We identified a total of 535 peer-reviewed articles and the number of full texts eligible for the project was 43. Several publications highlight the clinical value of pharmacologists in highly complex hospitals, where the strategies of PM are implemented. Although there are still no studies measuring the clinical efficiency and the efficacy of clinical pharmacology services, and the applicability of PM protocols, this review shows the considerable debate around the future mission of clinical pharmacology services as a bridging discipline capable of combining the complex knowledge and different professional skills needed to fully implement PM.

CONCLUSIONS

Various strategies have been conceived and planned to facilitate the transition from mainstream medicine to PM, which will enable patients to be treated more accurately, with significant advantages in terms of safety and effectiveness of treatments. Therefore, in the future, to ensure that the evolutionary process of medicine can involve as many patients and caregivers as possible, infrastructures capable of bringing together different multidisciplinary skills among health professionals will have to be implemented. Clinical pharmacologists could be the main drivers of this strategy because they already, with their multidisciplinary training, operate in a series of services in high-level hospitals, facilitating the clinical governance of the most challenging patients. The implementation of these strategies will lastly allow national health organizations to adequately address the management and therapeutic challenges related to the advent of new drugs and cell and gene therapies by facilitating the removal of economic and organizational barriers to ensure equitable access to PM. ( 2021; 82:XXX-XXX).