Great to be at @uOttawa today to celebrate @cdavidnaylor 's #Friesen prize! #scipol #HealthResearch #cdnsci 
1/ Other nations are moving much faster than Canada for bridging data science and health, to drive personalized medicine
2/ slides acknowledging past advances in health research are filled with old white men - we realize this, and things must change (more on this later)
3/ on evidence - interpretations vary widely including in healthcare delivery, leading to many "Grey zones" of clinical medicine and the establishment of "halfway technologies" that do not offer definitive results
4/ evidence based medicine and randomized clinic trials as we know them today, and by and large the fiels of clinical epidemiology, stemmed from a breakthrough report by Archie Cochrane
5/ How much better would treatment be if we can better account for a broader range of determinants? Looking only at minor gene variants can identify subsets of patients that respond, others not. Data is a must for personalized medicine. Without it, predictions are just guesses
6/ Precision medicine emerged as a priority for healthcare in Canada in the 2015 report. @cdavidnaylor argues there is still no serious plan to drive evidence based medicine in Canada. Shotgun therapy still prevails. Actions are being made, but we are still behind internationally
7/ the UK leads in this field. Just last month they approved funding the sequencing of a cohort of 5 million people. The US has the All Of Us project, where they are matching sequencing data to clinical data for millions.
8/ #Budget2018 had serious wording about big data, which helps, it is a meaningful sum, but it doesn't replace a formal strategy. We have an opportunity to deliver precision medicine in Canada.
10/ An important downpayment was made in #Budget2018 for #cdnsci and our young talent. We now have to provide solid support for graduate students and post-docs moving forward. /fin
@threadreaderapp unroll pls
