Precision medicine and cardiology

Published on June 30, 2016   24 min

A selection of talks on Pharmaceutical Sciences

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0:00
Hello, my name is Geoffrey Pitt. And the title of my presentation is "Precision Medicine and Cardiology."
0:09
United States President, Barack Obama, announced in his State of the Union address in January of 2015 that he was launching an effort to emphasize a Precision Medicine Initiative and said that the fruits of such efforts would be in areas such as cancer and diabetes.
0:27
While investigators have been building on new genomic technologies for over a decade to bring precision medicine close practice, this attention from a U.S. President has greatly increased the focus of many thought leaders, such as indicated by this highlighted editorial from the current and former directors of the National Institutes of Health that soon followed the president's announcement. As highlighted in President Obama's address, a lot of attention for precision medicine has focused on diabetes and cancer. But cardiovascular diseases remain the number one killer in the United States. Is there a role for precision medicine in cardiology? My goal today will be to convince you that precision medicine certainly will affect cardiology. In fact, while many of the mutation-specific cancer therapies have received a disproportionate amount of the recent attention focused on precision medicine, cardiology has been an unrecognized leader, in my opinion, in the development in precision medicine, and will continue to do so.
1:26
So first, let me set the stage. What exactly is precision in medicine? In this slide you will see several different definitions. Clearly, if looking at all of these, the concept of precision medicine is fluid. But the general theme captured by all of these definitions is that as clinicians our ultimate goal is to treat our patients individually, aiming for the right drug in the right dose at the right time.