Progress on Personalized Medicine? Updates from Harvard.

@HealthMed The 8th annual Personalized Medicine Conference took place at Harvard this week - a joint venture of Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and Partners Healthcare, lead by Professor Raju Kucherlapati, from the HMS Department of Genetics. Worth checking the excellent archive of past programmes, presentations and podcasts.
Meantime, some of the highlights?
- An excellent narrative on the partnership between Plexxikon (Peter Hirth) and Roche Diagnostics (Suzanne Cheng) to create a companion diagnostic/therapeutic pairing for vemurafenib (Zelboraf), the first FDA approved pairing for BRAF V600E positive metastatic melanoma
- Further case studies illustrating successful drug development using genetic approaches
- Personal case studies on the impact, clinical value and ethical and clinical challenges of genomic screening: from Joe Beery, Life Technologies, on detecting unrecognised treatable serious early childhood disorders, to John Lauerman, Bloomberg News, on consequences of sequencing for asymptomatic adults - questions on penetrance and future screening for onset e.g.  of metabolic disease and cancers

Harvard Medical School: New Research Building - Avenue Pasteur.

- Clinical potential, and regulatory and reimbursement challenges to introducing molecular diagnostics into clinical care pathways
- Leadership award to Randy Scott, In Vitae, whose discussion points included the relevance of Moore's Law (technology advancing) and Metcalfe's Law (people factors: exponential increase in interaction as network expands) to developments in personalized medicine
- Business models and their governance for use of genetic information
- A North Virginia (John Vockley, Inova) pioneering series of projects aiming to assess outcomes of neonatal genomic sequencing: from insight into preterm labour to prospective longitudinal follow-up to adulthood, supported by multi-generation family member sequencing combined with clinical histories
- The US Air Force Programme on Patient-Centered Precision Care (Dr Cecili Sessions), in partnership with the Coriell Institute and Johns Hopkins University,  aims of which include understanding the impact on health-related behaviour of providing personal genetic information on remediable medical disorders and on drug responses.
- A business school case study led by Professor Richard Hamermesh, Director of the HBS HealthCare Initiative, on reactive and proactive responses for development of companion diagnostics (1).
- Pros and cons of liberal vs. restrictive approaches to IP for genetic and other molecular diagnostics
- Engaging the policy community and the public in ethical, clinical, reimbursement and adoption issues for new diagnostics and treatments aimed at personalizing medicine, including case studies from the American Medical Association and the American Assocation for Cancer Research.

Personalized Medicine Conference website 
Companion and coupled diagnostics

FPM to launch a new journal on Health Policy and Technology

@HealthMed Health Policy and Technology (HPT), the new official journal of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM), will be launched in March 2012 as a cross-disciplinary journal, which will focus on past, present and future health policy and the role of technology in clinical and non-clinical national and international health environments. HPT will be published by Elsevier, a major international publisher of scientific, technical and medical information

The FPM continues to publish its first international publication, the Postgraduate Medical Journal, launched in 1925. HPT provides a further excellent way for the FPM to continue to make important national and international contributions to development of policy and practice within medicine and related disciplines. The aim of the FPM in establishing this new international journal is to publish relevant, timely and accessible articles and commentaries to support policy-makers, health professionals, health technology providers, patient groups and academia interested in health policy and technology.

Topics covered  by HPT will include
- Health technology, including drug discovery, diagnostics, medicines, devices, therapeutic delivery and eHealth systems
- Cross-national comparisons on health policy using evidence-based approaches
- National studies on health policy to determine the outcomes of technology-driven initiatives
- Cross-border eHealth including health tourism
- The digital divide in mobility, access and affordability of healthcare
- Health technology assessment (HTA) methods and tools for evaluating the effectiveness of clinical and non-clinical health technologies
- Health and eHealth indicators and benchmarks (measure/metrics) for understanding the adoption and diffusion of health technologies
- Health and eHealth models and frameworks to support policy-makers and other stakeholders in decision-making
- Stakeholder engagement with health technologies (clinical and patient/citizen buy-in)
- Regulation and health economics

Professor Wendy Currie will lead the journal as its founding Editor-in-Chief. Her research, consultancy and publications focus on policy-making for large-scale information and communications technology (ICT) projects in health, financial services and government.

The first issue of Health Policy and Technology will focus on Electronic Health Records in the 21st Century, with papers discussing implementation targets for EHRs in healthcare organizations, cross-border policies for EHRs, financial and non-financial costs of introducing EHRs, clinical and patient engagement with EHRs, government policy for EHRs and country comparisons, security and governance practices in relation to EHRs, and the role of EHRs in campaigns to improve citizens' health and reduce health inequalities.

The first issue also includes a paper on the pioneering new Centre for Health Technology Assessment of Devices and Diagnostics within the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). There is also the first of a series of interviews with international leaders in the field of health policy and technology, beginning with Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman of NICE.

The aim of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM) is to promote international calibre excellence in postgraduate medical education through its publications, clinical and scientific meetings, and other activities.  The FPM is a British medical charity that was founded at the end of World War I, when it pioneered development of post-graduate educational programmes in all branches of medicine.

Its foundation was the result of a merger between the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler the first president of the new organisation. The FPM is supported by Fellows with expertise in the practice of medicine, medical education and publishing, and research in medicine and related disciplines.

HPT website

FPM website

FPM contact email