Video Playlist
Click the menu icon in the upper right of the video to select 1-4 in the playlist.
Overview
Patients continue to inspire and drive us to the leading edge of precision medicine.* Yet at perhaps the most exciting and promising focus of precision medicine—its application to oncology—precision seems to matter less than predicted even 5 years ago. On the one hand, therapies such as the immune modulating drugs have emerged that appear effective across dozens of different cancers, yet the discovery of “driver mutations” in individual cancers continues to influence drug development and clinical decision making. In this context, how can patients help drive optimal decision making and societal investments in effective treatment and prevention of cancer and other diseases?
Our keynote this year, Greg Simon, President of the Biden Cancer Initiative, is ideally placed to answer this question both from the perspective of his role in founding FasterCures, patient advocacy within the pharmaceutical industry, and as a cancer survivor. Science and clinical care do not exist in isolation, and thus our first panel will address the question, "How do we overcome the disconnect between Patients, Clinicians, Insurers & Educators?" The panel includes leading representatives from payors, investors, data-driven oncology companies and media.
The question of patient leadership in precision medicine will be further explored in our second panel featuring citizen scientists, professional scientists who are parents of children requiring precision medicine therapies, as well as representatives of precision medicine companies, such as Editas Medicine.
Our third panel, composed of luminaries in technology and data science, will explore how digital technologies can help us complement molecular characterizations for further precision and to implement new precision medicine clinical workflows.
In our closing keynote, we will hear from Gerry Cox as he describes how Editas Medicine brings extremely precise therapies to bear on the future of very individualized medicine.
Agenda
Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm ET
| Time | Topic & Speaker(s) |
|---|---|
| 8:00–9:00am | Continental Breakfast and Check-in |
| 9:00–9:15am | Welcome — Zak Kohane, Harvard Medical School |
| 9:15–9:30am | Opening Remarks — George Daley, Dean, Harvard Medical School |
| 9:30–10:30am | Opening Keynote — Greg Simon, President, Biden Cancer Initiative |
| 10:30–10:45am | BREAK |
| 10:45am–12:00pm | PANEL 1 — How do we overcome the disconnect between Patients, Clinicians, Insurers & Educators?
|
| 12:00–1:00pm | LUNCH |
| 1:00–2:15pm | PANEL 2 — Is Patient Leadership Critical?
|
| 2:15–2:30pm | BREAK |
| 2:30–3:45pm | PANEL 3 — How is Technology Empowering Precision Medicine?
|
| 3:45–4:00pm | BREAK |
| 4:00–4:45pm | Closing Keynote — Gerald Cox, Editas Medicine |
| 4:45–5:00pm | Closing Remarks — Zak Kohane, Harvard Medical School |
Questions?
Contact us at precisionmedicine@hms.harvard.edu
*What do we mean by “precision medicine”? From the perspective of one of the members of the National Academy of Sciences committee that wrote the report, we mean taking an explicit multidimensional view of patients: not just one data modality such as genomics or environmental exposure. We argue that this perspective allows for more precise matching of humans to disease states (diagnosis), future disease states (prognosis) and appropriate therapies.
Conference co-sponsored by DBMI, PIC-SURE BD2K Center of Excellence, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Datavant, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), and Verily Life Sciences.