The First Annual Midwest Bioinformatics Conference was held on Thursday October 15th and Friday October 16th at UMKC, Volker Campus.It was a knowledge-packed conference for all the budding bioinformaticians with speakers coming from different fields of bioinformatics and sharing their valuable experiences with the audience. On the second day of the conference, Dr.John Spertus from Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute brought up a much discussed subject in bioinformatics- Precision Medicine .
Dr. Spertus focused on ‘Applying Precision Medicine’ in today’s world. He said that we can improve our treatment approach based on evidence medicine. A risk stratification model can be designed where we can see the treatment approach from a genetics, pharmacogenomics, proteomics and biomarkers point of view and than tailor a specific personalized treatment or medicine for a patient. He specified that their are already risk stratification models available but are not being frequently used for improving precision medicine. Using such tools to improve the value of precision medicine and in planning the treatment and medicine approach of the next patient would really help to cut down the health care cost and would also save patient’s as well as the physician’s valuable time by making the treatment fast and target specific.The main implication of designing this Risk stratification models would be to obtain Decision Support Tools from this models. The current Informed Consent Form for patients in hospitals can be replaced with such decision support tools and thus collect maximum information from a patient with his consent on it. This would aid a physician decide the treatment approach required for the patient. It also improves consistency of care, beneficial for treating high risk patients with utmost attention and ultimately reduces the burden of cost. Dr.Spertus and his colleagues have also published a paper in the British Medical Journal highlighting the importance of Precision Medicine in reducing bleeding in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. The detailed research paper can be found on the following link:
The future goals would be to use these risk models in all areas of medicine and extending models to include novel -omics as well.
Overall, Precision Medicine is an exciting field of research in bioinformatics which is relatively still undiscovered and I am thankful to Dr.John Spertus for enlightening us on this subject through his speech. Hope precision medicine helps us to deliver better health care services and bring more smiles on the faces of patients for whom we care so much and for whom we are here to serve.
Cool Badge from QIAGEN Bioinformatics..Proud to be a Bioinformatician!! 🙂
Megha Shah 