US President Barack Obama is proposing to spend $215 million on a precision medicine initiative, whose centrepiece will be a national study drawing on the health records and DNA of one million volunteers. The term precision medicine refers to treatments tailored to a persons genetic profile, an idea which is already transforming the way doctors fight cancer and some rare diseases. When treating cancer, for example, doctors can nowadays assess any molecular abnormalities in the cancerous cells so that they can apply the appropriate treatment. Some types of abnormalities may be found in different types of cancer, and patients with these conditions will be given the same treatment. Studying a set of molecular abnormalities in a patient in order to prescribe a unique, personalised treatment for his/her condition appears to be the future of medicine and this means that going forward treatment will be based on peoples individual genetic maps Barack Obama has recently put forward a funding initiative to support precision medicine with a view to developing technology that has to date been under-exploited. The aim is to change the old one-size-fits-all approach, as Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology … Continue reading →

Irvine, CA (PRWEB) March 04, 2015 Proove Biosciences, a commercial and research leader in Personalized Medicine, is excited to announce the launch of their CME-accredited course entitled Incorporating Genetic Testing to Optimize the Management of Pain. The continuing medical education program will be available at Medscape.com for the next year. The focus of the program is to teach medical professionals how to recognize inadequate pain treatments, integrate appropriate pain management techniques, and incorporate genetic testing into the management plan for treating pain (with a focus on the use and understanding of pharmacogenetics for individual patients). It is estimated that 116 million American adults suffer from chronic pain, more than those affected by heart disease, cancer, and diabetes combined. Yet despite its prevalence, chronic pain is often under-recognized and under-treated. "Pain management involves a series of critical considerations to be made by treatment providers: the accurate assessment and diagnosis of pain, the assignment of an appropriate treatment plan, the screening of patients for contraindications, and optimization of the selection, dosage, and frequency of medications. These evaluations are difficult to make accurately due to the large variability and subjectivity innate in such assessments. However, emerging data demonstrates the importance of pharmacogenetics in … Continue reading →