Since launching Women of Precision Medicine in January 2025 with our inaugural 25 Perspectives collection, we've grown a community of leaders shaping the field, most recently our 2026 honorees, recognized across diagnostics, therapeutics, clinical care, policy, and commercialization.

Halfway through 2026, we went back to a group of women from both cohorts with a set of questions about how their perspectives have evolved, what they're more optimistic about now than they were six months ago, and what they're watching in the back half of the year. A common thread ran through their answers: precision medicine's next chapter is moving from generating signal to changing what actually happens in care.

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About Women of Precision Medicine

The Women of Precision Medicine (WOPM) initiative was created to amplify and celebrate women's leadership across the precision medicine landscape, recognizing women advancing the field across science, diagnostics, clinical care, technology, and policy, while inspiring future generations to pursue impactful careers in precision medicine. This mid-year check-in continues that mission, revisiting our community to capture where the field is heading and the advice these leaders would pass to the next generation.

Key Themes from the 2026 Mid-Year Check-In

1. From Detection to Action

The clearest through-line across the group: the field has made enormous strides in detection, and the frontier now is turning those advances into real changes in patient care. This builds directly on the "from discovery to delivery" theme our 2026 cohort raised in January, but sharpens it toward the harder, less glamorous work of adoption.

The science increasingly works. What is less settled is everything that has to happen after a test proves it can find disease early: getting patients screened in the first place, making sure results actually change a clinical decision, and convincing the system to pay for it. Several honorees described this as the field's real unfinished work, and noted that it is less a scientific problem than a behavioral, operational, and financial one.

Reimbursement, in particular, came up as the lever most likely to determine whether a promising tool reaches patients at scale, and as one that rarely moves on its own. Getting innovative diagnostics paid for, honorees noted, tends to require the kind of sustained collaboration and partnership across industry, providers, and payers that adoption ultimately depends on.

Precision medicine will be judged less by how much it can measure, and more by what it can meaningfully change." — Lauren Laing, Oxford Science Enterprises

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2. Data, Not Models, as the Strategic Asset

As powerful AI models become widely available and increasingly interchangeable, several honorees see the durable advantage shifting to the data itself. The reasoning: once the models are a commodity anyone can access, what sets an organization apart is the quality and depth of what it can train and validate on, especially proprietary datasets that are richly characterized and tied to real patient outcomes. Building and curating that kind of data, rather than chasing the next algorithm, is increasingly seen as the harder and more defensible edge.

That framing also raises the stakes on protecting and sharing data well. Honorees flagged a growing tension: legitimate concerns about data security, both locally and globally, are beginning to restrict the very data-sharing that genomic medicine depends on to advance. And as clinical AI reshapes care, the quality of the underlying data becomes a question of representation as much as security, with the potential to either widen or help close long-standing gaps in areas like women's health. Together, these points are a reminder that data is at once the field's most valuable asset and its most vulnerable one.

We are entering an era where generating high-quality biological data may matter more than developing the algorithms themselves." — Michelle Teng, Etcembly

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3. The Clinical Toolkit Comes of Age

Across the group, honorees described a field where the science of early detection is maturing into real clinical and therapeutic use, rather than remaining promising in principle. A recurring point: reliable early detection increasingly means reading several biological layers together rather than any one alone, a shift honorees described as moving from optional to essential. As the evidence mounts that no single molecular signal tells the whole story, multi-omic integration is becoming the expectation rather than the exception.

That same maturation is opening new therapeutic ground. Honorees pointed to real-world datasets and AI tools at scale, positioning the field to develop novel therapeutics that could transform cancer care. At the same time, they noted that diagnostic-approval pathways in the US and EU are still taking shape, and remain a space worth watching closely.

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Beyond the Field: Advice for the Next Generation

Our last question was a more personal one: what advice would they give a woman earlier in her precision medicine career? One theme came up more than any other: don't wait until you feel ready.

Nicole St. Jean, Executive Director of Business Development & Alliance Management at BioNTech, put it plainly: confidence is rarely the starting point—it grows by taking action. As she put it, "It’s okay if you don’t see the entire path ahead. You only need the courage to begin. Trust yourself."

That same idea was echoed throughout our cohorts: take the leap, and let confidence build alongside your momentum. Several honorees pointed to the value of an outsider's perspective, noting that a background from beyond the field can be an asset rather than a gap. Others offered advice specific to precision medicine's cross-disciplinary nature: build at the boundaries where biology meets AI, engineering, and data science; pair broad, generalist range with real specialist depth; and treat networking and collaboration as engines of career growth, not afterthoughts.

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Looking Ahead

If there is one signal from this group, it is that precision medicine's hardest and most important work is shifting, from proving what is possible to making it real in clinics, in reimbursement, and at population scale. It is a fitting continuation of what our 2026 cohort described in January as a field "moving from promise to real-world impact." We extend our sincere thanks to the women who shared their time and perspective with us at the midpoint of the year.

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