Health care professionals nationwide are tangled in a discussion regarding the ethics and regulations of the growing field of precision medicine. Also known as personalized medicine, the field aims to analyze patients genes so doctors can home in on treatments specific to each person. As the talks have intensified in recent years, concerns over privacy and insurance discrimination are colliding with benefits like predicting disease contraction and better, more-personalized treatment. The debate hit the University of Minnesota campus on Thursday with the start of a lecture series focusing on the standardization and policies of precision medicine. Heidi Rehm, a Harvard University pathology professor, gave the first in a three-part lecture in the Universitys Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and Life Sciences series. Her lecture comes soon after President Barack Obamas announcement of a plan late last month that calls for a major biomedical research initiative that would create a biobank, or a collection of genetic data, on one million Americans. If Congress approves Obamas proposal, it would put individualized medicine more easily within doctors reach. Rehm, who studies precision medicine, said how the technology is used and the way results are interpreted should become more standardized than … Continue reading →

As obesity becomes an increasingly prominent health condition in the United States, University researchers have made new discoveries about the biological pathways that cause it. In the largest genome-wide study ever, the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits consortium of researchers analyzed more than 300,000 genetic samples and found 97 new genetic locations across the genome that are associated with obesity and body mass index triple the number of previously known sites. This finding led researchers to believe obesity is much more related to ones genes than was previously thought. Elizabeth Speliotes, assistant professor of internal medicine and a senior author of the GIANT study, said if scientists can pinpoint the specific gene variants or proteins that contribute to obesity, then therapeutic interventions can directly target them. Speliotes said the study could lead to a new era of tailored obesity care. We are realizing that many of the common diseases we aim to treat are caused by multiple different underlying causes, Speliotes said. So now we can understand what those causes are and better define them. And then hopefully in the future we can sub-classify people into what they are at risk for versus what the general population is at risk … Continue reading →

The National Institutes of Health is slated to receive $215 million with the hope of individualizing medical treatments by using patients genetic information. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama announced the Precision Medical Initiative, a program with the goal of enabling doctors to better understand diseases through genetic sequencing of patients and ultimately choose better treatments. In cancer treatment, for example, a patients tumor might be sequenced to uncover the specific mutations causing the disease, and physicians will use that information to select the right drug or predict which will be most effective. The approach has gained traction in the treatment of cancer and rare genetic diseases, but is not available for all patients and is yet to be widely applied to other diseases. Precision medicine, using genomic information in a way that affects their clinical decisions about care, is already here and now, said Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which carried out the Human Genome Project and is now working to apply that research to solve medical problems. This is not science fiction, but we are just starting to ascend this mountain. This will be a very … Continue reading →

Hip arthritis 3.5 years after stem cell therapy by Harry Adelson, N.D. Bobby describes his outcome 3.5 years after stem cell therapy for his arthritic hip by Harry Adelson, N.D. http://www.docereclinics.com. By: Harry Adelson, N.D. … Continue reading →