gms | German Medical Science

Annual Meeting of the German MLA (AGMB)

Basel, 07.09. - 09.09.2015

Toward precision medicine: A new social contract

Meeting Abstract

  • AAAS/Science

Arbeitsgemeinschaft für medizinisches Bibliothekswesen (AGMB). Jahrestagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für medizinisches Bibliothekswesen (AGMB). Basel, 07.-09.09.2015. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2015. Doc15agmb16

doi: 10.3205/15agmb16, urn:nbn:de:0183-15agmb167

Published: July 27, 2015

© 2015 AAAS/Science.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Outline

Text

Patients have the power to drive development of a new taxonomy of disease and precision medicine. In January 2015, President Barak Obama launched the Precision Medicine Initiative, which offers a bold new research effort. This trailblazing initiative, backed by a $215 million dollar investment from his 2016 budget, seeks to take into account individual differences in genes, lifestyles, and environments to improve patients’ health. Targeted therapies make use of blood tests, images of the body, or other technologies to measure individual factors called “biomarkers”. These biomarkers can then be used to determine who is most likely to benefit from a treatment, who is at higher risk of a side effect, or who needs a different dose. Targeting therapy can improve drug safety, and make sure that only people likely to have a good response get put on a drug.

A Biomarker Summit will be held in Berlin 5-8 October 2015. The program will include coverage on national initiatives to move precision medicine forward via biomarkers, making the discussion of international relevance. The AAAS Product Review will present discoveries in precision medicine published in Science Translational Medicine from 2012-2015, with special coverage of a May 2015 research article “More Precision in Lung Cancer Therapy”.