The National Academies' Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health: Where we have been and where we are heading.

The clinical application of genetics and genomics to advance precision health is one of the most dynamic and promising areas of medicine. In 2020, building on nearly 15 years of work, the Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine undertook a strategic planning process to assess its strengths, consider the current challenges facing the field, and set out new goals for its future work. As a result, the Roundtable has updated its vision and mission and prioritized four major areas of inquiry-innovation, dialogue, equity, and adoption-while keeping true to its founding goal of providing a neutral convening space for the diversity of stakeholders in genomics and precision health. The Roundtable is unique for its breadth of membership and is committed to fostering a new era for precision health built on decades of expanding knowledge and the emergence of new technologies. To achieve its goals, the Roundtable seeks to broaden its membership's diversity and to engage with new audiences. Roundtable members explore how evidence-based discoveries in genomics could be adopted and used in innovative ways to better serve human health, how equitable access to genomic and precision health technologies can be ensured, and how the Roundtable and broader genomics and precision health community can communicate more effectively to inform the public regarding genomics and precision health. As a first principle, the Roundtable is working to support the overall goal that all people benefit from genomics for precision health.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Current US Policy to Address Pain.

Pain is a significant public health problem that needs policy at the national and local level to resolve incidents of insufficient, ineffective, and disparate pain treatment while limiting the risk of inadvertently increasing the use of treatment such as opioids that can result in public harm.The National Pain Strategy serves as the first comprehensive approach to address pain and provides a roadmap with substantial broad and specific policy implications. Although much has been accomplished to date, transitions in political power, available data and funding, and the current opioid epidemic continue to have an impact on implementation of the National Pain Strategy.A sustained, coordinated effort with multipronged policies in many forms on both federal and state levels via regulations, laws, and guidelines is warranted. However, research is needed to evaluate the impact and potential unintended consequences of increased legislation and regulation. Nevertheless, policy related to the management of pain may provide the path to new treatments and models of care to reduce the impact of pain as a public health crisis in this country.

Reflections on governance models for the clinical translation of stem cells.

Governance models for the oversight of human embryonic stem cell research have been proposed which mirror in large part familiar oversight mechanisms for research with human subjects and non-human animals. While such models are in principle readily endorsable, there are a set of concerns related to their implementation--such as ensuring that an elaborated informed consent process and conducting long-term monitoring of research subjects are tenable--which suggest areas where gathering data may facilitate more appropriate oversight. In addition, it is unclear whether a new governance model based at individual institutions are sufficient to address the ethical issues inherent to this research. Regardless, some of the concerns that have arisen in considering the appropriate governance of stem cell research, particularly the important translational pathway of innovation in contrast to staged research, transparency and publication, and social justice, may be useful in science and translational research more broadly.