Conference Examines How Personalized Medicine Will Transform the Healthcare Model

Citing the therapies that result from advances in personalized medicine as the next “killer apps” in healthcare, dozens of renowned leaders in this emerging field were in attendance at last week’s Personalized Healthcare National Conference hosted by the OSU Medical Center. 

Personalized medicine is the practice of studying an individual’s genetic profile to determine best therapies for treating and preventing disease.  Experts believe this approach will create therapies that are so effective, consumers will demand system wide changes in the healthcare industry.  During the conference Dr. Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology and the inventor of the DNA gene sequencer, said that new therapies based on personalized medicine will be so effective that they will drive the transformation of healthcare from its current state of trial-and-error effectiveness. 

Hood says he envisions over the next 10 years that not only will patient data analysis become more cost-effective and prevalent, but that there will also be advances in home-based testing that will enable individuals to check their therapeutic response to given therapies.  “If you take Lipitor, why not test your genetic assays three to four times a week,” he says.

OSU plans to collaborate with the Institute for Systems Biology to form the P4 Medical Institute which will accelerate movement toward predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory healthcare. 

For more information on this story, see the release from OSU Medical Center.

For more news and recaps on last week’s conference see the OSU personalized medicine blog.