Molecular Medicine TriConference 2008
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MEETING REPORT
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Molecular Medicine TriConference 2008 Bridging Biology, Chemistry, and Business Anne Bardsley-Elliot Wolters Kluwer Health | Adis, Auckland, New Zealand
For the 15th year, Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s (CHI) Molecular Medicine TriConference recently gathered pharmaceutical and biotech senior scientists and executives, and researchers from academia, hospitals, and government and national laboratories, to San Francisco to discuss the progress and the business of molecular medicine. The event took place at the Moscone North Convention Center, March 25–28, 2008, with >3000 delegates and 120 exhibitors in attendance. Molecular diagnostics took prominence, with a well attended track of sessions spanning 3 days and >50 speaker presentations. In his Keynote address, ‘Disruptive Innovation in Health Care’, Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School summed up a recurring theme of the conference, and the Molecular Diagnostics track in particular. He described the history of healthcare as evolving from the practice of intuitive medicine, through empirical medicine, and towards a new phase of ‘precision medicine’, based on rapidly growing insights into molecular processes and genetics. He stated that “in the absence of the ability to precisely define a disease, the care of patients is best undertaken by highly skilled professionals, whose intuition is based on deep experience.” New molecular diagnostic and molecular imaging technologies are now beginning to enable precision medicine, which depends upon the ability to diagnose the cause rather than the symptom of a disease. This promises to make medicine more accessible and less costly, while increasing its predictable effectiveness. This theme was later echoed by Gabriele Beer, PhD, the Diagnostics Liaison Manager for Roche Diagnostics, who outlined the progress in science, and the parallel progress of diagnosis and therapy from the macroscopic level to the cellular, subcellular, and molecular levels. Yet, she noted that despite our current knowledge of molecular disease mechanisms and genetic variation, most patients are still treated in a few similar ways, with >20% receiving ineffective treatment, and >100 000 deaths occurring per
year in the US as a result of adverse drug reactions. ‘Personalized healthcare’, involving the use of new molecular insights and molecular diagnostic tests to better tailor medicines and better manage a patient’s disease, is viewed as the solution. Personalized Healthcare Personalized healthcare, or personalized medicine, is a concept built on the premise that laboratory tests can accurately predict the response of individual patients to a particular treatment, and establish a baseline risk for disease progression. It is being driven by scientific and technologic innovation, and better understanding of disease heterogeneity. Technical Innovations
As outlined by Ralph Snyderman, MD, Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University, and Founder and Chairman, Proventys, Inc., the mai
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