I watched excellent NIH videocasts on personalized medicine called Comparative Effectiveness and Personalized Medicine: An Essential Interface. Here are the links to recordings: day 1 and day 2 that I highly recommend. The conference was very informative and well done. It started with introduction on how personal genome sequencing can influence the future of medicine. One of the interesting questions asked was about using the term personalized medicine. Doctors where doing personalized medicine for ages; a routine blood pressure measurements gives a personalized info, so it seems that genetic testing won't be that different.
It was interesting to hear the story about Gefitinib (marketed as Iressa). PharmGKB has annotations that shows specific mutations associated with improved progression free survival in gefitinib-treated non-small-cell lung cancer patients. There were other examples presented to show how personalized genome helped directing clinical trials towards more useful results. The search for genetic variant in http://clinicaltrials.gov returned 421 studies as of this writing. There were also questions raised about how affective existing drugs would be if one can guarantee adherence to drug regimen.
I also liked the presentation about http://www.armyofwomen.org. It seems that one of the major problems in drug discovery today are clinical trials that are too expensive and hard to do.
Overall, I learned a lot from the conference and I'm very grateful to NIH for hosting the videocasts.
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