Hermann Nabi

Hermann Nabi, PhD, HDR, is a senior researcher in the Oncology axis at CHU de Québec-Université Laval Research Center and Professor of Epidemiology at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Université Laval. Prior to joining the Center and Université Laval in 2016, Prof. Nabi headed the Research Department of Social and Human Sciences, Epidemiology, Public Health at the Institut National du Cancer(INCa) and was a regular researcher at l’Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM U.1018) in France.

His team’s work focuses on precision medicine, this emerging medical approach for disease prevention and treatment that takes into account individual differences in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person. With advances in genomics and the advent of new molecular biology technologies, precision medicine is attracting a lot of attention and has become an area of ​​strong international competition. However, despite the large volume and unprecedented rate of gene or biomarker discoveries, relatively few have reached the bedside or contributed to improving the health of populations. This relative poor performance could be explained by the fact that only a small proportion (about 3%) of all published global research addresses issues related to the integration of genomics innovations into health and disease prevention. For this reason, the ultimate goal of Prof. Nabi’s team is to generate evidence to facilitate a successful and responsible integration of precision medicine innovations into the prevention, the diagnosis, the treatment and follow-up of cancers.

To achieve this goal, his work is organized around the following main objectives:

• Characterize the mechanisms and organizational implications of the progressive adoption of innovations in precision medicine in oncology;
• Determine the acceptability and attitudes of stakeholders (e.g. patients, general public, health professionals, decision-makers) towards these innovations in order to identify obstacles, facilitators and needs;
• Evaluate the impact of diagnostic and therapeutic innovations in precision medicine on the quality of life and clinical outcomes of cancer patients and the effectiveness for the health system,
• Develop and evaluate intervention methods to support the integration of innovations, which takes into account patients and populations’ preferences, economic, accessibility and impact issues, in a knowledge transfer perspective.

The originality of this research program lies in its interdisciplinary approach, which combines a variety of skills and methodological tools to answer questions that are at the interface of several scientific fields. This approach proposes a new way of approaching translational research (the transfer of discoveries from laboratory to bedside), through the use of concepts, models and methods the human and social sciences, epidemiology, public health, health services research and implementation science.