3 Ways Personalized Medicine is Moving Forward

Personalized medicine—targeting treatments based on patients’ genetic profiles, environments and lifestyles—offers promising ways for physicians to better understand and treat individual patients’ health. The potential for innovation is here, but this type of medicine brings many questions as well. Learn more about top issues in personalized medicine at a special conference at Harvard Medical School.The 11th Annual Personalized Medicine Conference, Nov. 18-19, is co-hosted and presented by Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine, Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School, in association with the AMA, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society for Human Genetics and Personalized Medicine Coalition.The White House announced its commitment to personalized medicine innovation in January with the launch of the president’s Precision Medicine Initiative. The initiative will allocate funds to the National Institutes of Health for the development of a national research cohort of at least 1 million volunteers to propel understanding of health and disease through genomics.It also will include funds for the National Cancer Institute to scale up efforts to identify genomic drivers in cancer. Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will acquire additional expertise and advance the development of curated databases to support regulations in precision medicine. The Office of the National Coordinator also will receive funds to support interoperability standards and exchange of data across systems.Read more at AMA Wire.