Personalized Medicine: 20 Years Later
On June 27, 2000, accompanied by Francis Collins and Craig Venter, competitors in the race to map the human genome, President Bill Clinton marched into the East Room of the White House, where, as Clinton noted, Meriwether Lewis had laid out his expedition across the American frontier to the Pacific Ocean for an appreciative Thomas Jefferson 200 years before. Two centuries later, Clinton suggested that Collins and Venter’s mapping of the human genome would prove no less momentous than Lewis and Clark’s journey across the American continent.
Clinton was confident that because we “are learning the language in which God created life,” understanding the human genome would, in the words of The New York Times, “revolutionize the practice of medicine.” In the years following Clinton’s remarks, it was said with confidence, and believed by many, that medicine could and would become personalized, predictive, and preventive.
It became easy to scoff at these predictions, especially in the early years when there were relatively few examples of personalized medicine. As Machiavelli explained, “There is nothing more difficult . . . than to take the lead in a new order of things.” This, Machiavelli said, is partly the consequence of people’s fear of the future but also their reluctance to “believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”
Working alongside tens of thousands of colleagues in their respective arenas of industry, clinical care, and government, Mark Levin, an investor in several of the earliest companies in personalized medicine, Ralph Snyderman, who was the founding and first CEO of Duke University Health System, and Janet Woodcock, a long-time leader and former Acting Commissioner at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have played leading roles in helping to drive more than 100,000 molecular diagnostic tests and 300 personalized medicines to the United States market in the past two decades.
On November 14, Levin, Snyderman, and Woodcock will take the stage at Harvard Medical School’s Joseph B. Martin Conference Center to share their views on how far personalized medicine has come — and how far it has yet to go.
Convening three of the most distinguished leaders in personalized medicine for a conversation about what it takes to change medical paradigms and practices for the benefit of patients and health systems, this discussion promises to animate the spirit of initiatives in personalized medicine for years to come.
