Inaugural personalized medicine symposium scheduled

“The goal of personalized medicine is to define genetic or other molecular biomarkers that influence disease predisposition and treatment outcomes and then use that information to tailor treatment of individual patients on the basis of their genetic make-up,” said James R. Broach, director of the Penn State Hershey Institute for Personalized Medicine. “Such markers may reflect individual differences in drug metabolism, the susceptibility of a diseased tissue to a particular therapy or the likelihood of a successful surgical outcome. The Penn State Hershey Symposium on Personalized Medicine brings together international experts in this field to describe what has been accomplished to date in personalized medicine and, more importantly, the extent to which those successes can be extended and elaborated.”

Speakers will be:

--Dana Crawford, assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, Center for Human Genetics, Vanderbilt University, "Using biobanks linked to electronic health records to move from base pairs to bedside”

--Arnold J. Levine, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, and Cancer Institute of New Jersey, "Predicting the outcomes of breast and prostate cancers at diagnosis”

--Catherine A. McCarty, principal research scientist, Essentia Institute of Rural Health, Duluth, Minnesota, “Personalized Medicine – the community perspective”

--Bruce M. Psaty, Cardiovascular Health Research Unit and professor, departments of medicine and epidemiology, University of Washington, "Genomics consortia, pharmacogenetics, and studies of statin-related rhabdomyolysis"

--Marylyn D. Ritchie, director, Center for Systems Genomics and associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, Penn State, “Mining electronic health records for genomic research – experiences of the eMERGE network”

--Daniel Sullivan, executive vice president and associate center director for clinical investigations, Moffitt Cancer Center, “Accelerating Clinical Research Using the TCC Database and Biorepository”

To register, visit med.psu.edu/research.

Posters are sought for the presentations. To present a poster, send an abstract of the poster content to Kurt Kissinger at kkissinger [a] hmc.psu (p) edu by Wednesday, May 23.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided.