Welcome

Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to invite you to the second Up Close and Personalized, International Congress on Personalized Medicine, which will take place 25-28 July, 2013 in Paris, France.

Personalized Medicine is revolutionizing the medical world. Understanding and integrating genetic and molecular information with traditional clinical knowledge is the hallmark of this transformation. At present much of the medical practice is based on standards of care derived from the epidemiologic studies of large cohorts that do not take into account the individual’s genetic, proteomic, and metabolic characteristics. Furthermore, in spite of efforts to develop data-driven, expert–based, clinical decision support systems, there are no clear and simple means to disseminate new findings into clinical practice.

Following the great success of the meeting in Florence Italy last year, the main focus of the second Up Close and Personalized Congress is to examine the essential clinical, imaging, genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, pharmacogenomic and biomarker data necessary to predict, prevent and treat major medical conditions concerning metabolism (diabetes and obesity) and cancer. As in the first meeting one of the key themes will be to explore bio-informatic tools, algorithms, decision support systems and other new platforms for disease prediction and better tailoring treatment modeling to the individual patient. Furthermore, we will discuss health policy issues such as barriers for implementing Personalized Medicine, and quality assurance.

On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committees I look forward to welcoming you to what promises to be an exciting and fruitful event.

Eddy Karnieli, MD
Congress Chairperson