Translating advances in personalized medicine to population health

An important current trend in health care is the move towards personalized medicine, with risk defined through genetics as well as clinical and family histories. A key goal of personalized medicine is to use pharmacogenomics to enable delivery of targeted treatments based upon knowledge of an individual's genetic variation in drug metabolism and response to ultimately maximize efficacy and safety. Despite the advances that have been made in pharmacogenomics and related genomic technologies, there is relatively little clinical application to date, and many questions remain regarding how the translation from basic science and clinical research to actual practice and health policies is going to be implemented in order to influence health care delivery. What factors will determine the clinical adoption of personalized medicine applications? What are the challenges facing the public health community in promoting and disseminating research about personalized health care and how can these challenges be overcome? How should new genetic tests be evaluated? The extent to which personalized medicine will be achieved is bound up in the answers to these, and related, questions. Drawing from various data sources, this panel of experts will address these challenging questions from several perspectives (including academic and government) that will provide an overview of the current scientific progress in the field and its potential clinical and policy impacts, the use of epidemiology to evaluate new diagnostics, the economic and regulatory implications of incorporating genomic information into screening and treatment strategies, and the challenges faced in moving personalized medicine forward.