The University of Michigan, along with several other academic medical centers, is hosting a World Precision Medicine Conference, June 6-7 at Ross School of Business. Co-hosts include Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford Health Care, and University of California, San Francisco. Other participants include Michigan State University and Wayne State University. The event is one of three such conferences scheduled across the country in 2018.
Vicki Ellingrod, PharmD, FCCP, Associate Director at the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR), is leading U-M’s efforts for the conference. The conference series is run by a third party that handles promotion, registration, and logistics.
The event theme is “Big Data in Action: Data-Driven Insights in the Clinic.” Speakers include Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health; Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health; MICHR’s Vicki Ellingrod, and several other U-M faculty. See the full list of speakers here.
According to U-M, precision medicine (or precision health) “uses advanced tools and technology to discover the genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors that influence a population’s health and provides personalized solutions that allow individuals to improve their health and wellness.”
Precision medicine was mentioned in MICHR’s 2016 CTSA grant application, most notably in the Informatics section with regard to the Research Data Warehouse. In addition, MICHR played a role in developing a community-centric approach to the U-M Precision Medicine Initiative. MICHR’s past Community Engagement faculty lead, Jorge Delva, MSW, PhD, helped a geneticist and bioinformatician build a network of community hospitals and developed a rigorous plan for engaging patients as research partners; his contributions resulted in co-PI status on an NIH grant for U-M to serve as a cohort collection center.
Learn more about the Precision Medicine World Conference here.