Department of Information Systems
Challenges of Implementing Personalized (Precision) Medicine
Dr. Eddy Karnieli, Rambam Medical Center, Israel
11:00-12:00 Friday, 7 October 2016, ITE 459, UMBC
The concept of personalized (precision) medicine (PM) emphasizes the scientific and technological innovations that enable the physician to tailor disease prediction, diagnosis and treatment to the individual patient, based on a personalized data-driven approach. The major challenge for the medical systems is to translate the molecular and genomic advances into clinical available means.
For example, type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major health problem. T2D is a very heterogeneous disease with at least three subgroups that exhibit distinct phenotypic and biological characteristics and susceptibilities to diabetes-related complications and comorbidities and specific genetic markers. Genomic analysis has already revealed about 80 gene loci variations. However, only few clinical and biochemical factors are taken into account in identifying diabetes type and advising therapy.
Among the main challenges to implementation of personalized (precision) medicine into current medical practice are knowledge gap of professionals; lack of approved and readily available genomic, phramcogenomics and other –omics tests; the lack of decision support systems integrated with EMRs clinical data, as well as updated genetic and molecular information at the clinical point of care and ethical and regulatory challenges. Currently, expensive cost of the new molecular targeting drugs like those used in treating cancers and rare genetic diseases patients results in major economic burden on the health system. Further, the question whether PM will reduce major causes of chronic morbidity and mortality still waits for an answer. During the lecture I will also outline programs currently being implemented to overcome these challenges.
Professor Eddy Karnieli is a graduate of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion– Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.He obtained clinical training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Rambam Medical Center and did his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Diabetes, Obesity and Endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego and at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the Rambam Medical Center. …