GENES WITH THE PERFECT FIT

Above are a few universities and institutions that are researching ways to develop and improve personalized medicine. Their goal is to create treatments that are more effective for a greater percentage of people and can be altered depending on an individual's genetic needs.

 

Vanderbilt University is hoping to transform present day medicine. Instead of a generalized approach, this university wants medicine to focus on the individual. Vanderbilt is dedicated to researching and discovering new techniques that can be applied to personalized medicine. 

 

Harvard University created a program called the Personal Genome Project in 2005. This program was founded with the belief that sharing scientific data is crucial to success in research. It was created to serve as an international database for scientists to share discoveries. More specifically, the Personal Genome Project aims to create a public genome, health, and trait data page that can be accessed and utilized by the scientific community throughout the world.

 

The University of California Davis has been involved in personalized medicine for a number of years. The Cancer Center at the university is researching the differences in genetic makeup and reactions to pharmaceuticals, also called pharmacogenics. The Center is focused on creating personalized drugs to fit an individual's genome while also providing the most accurate and aggressive approach to tackling devastating cancers. UCD professor of medicine, David Gandara, states, "Personalized medicine is having a profound impact on the way physicians approach making the best treatment choices for their patients with lung cancer." Gandara has researched personalized medicine for many years, hoping to apply his findings to his lung cancer patients.

 

Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine is a research institution that hopes to contribute to advanced genomic and molecular profiling with a goal of eventually allowing experts to accurately predict disease risks. The organization is exploring and comparing millions of components in blood at the molecular level during healthy and disease stages. This allows the center to carefully examine, evaluate, and prevent diseases such as cancer.

 

The University of Maryland School of Medicine aims to make individualized medicine safer. They are researching new techniques in personalized medicine, as well as other sciences. The University is dedicated to the development of safer methods, as well as the education of the next generation of personalized medicine researchers.

 

Washington University, located in St. Louis, researches individual treatments that help cancer patients. In 2008, they were the first to successfully sequence a complete genome of a cancer patient. Co-leader of the research, Timothy Ley, M.D. stated, "We now have a genetic playbook for this type of leukemia." Washington University has been a leading force in the attempt to provide patients with personalized treatments that will aggressively attack their specific type of cancer. By using the patient's genome, experts can predict what the patient's response to a medication will be, allowing them to choose the most effective treatment for their patient.