For months, I’ve been trying to keep you up-to-date in personalized genetics, an emerging field of medicine. I’d like to share some timeless resources with you now which you could use while seeking information about this branch of genetics and medicine.

Let’s start with the goals of personalized health care:

• Goal 1: Link Clinical and Genomic Information to Support Personalized Health Care
• Goal 2: Protect individuals from discrimination based or unauthorized use of genetic information
• Goal 3: Ensure the accuracy and clinical validity of genetic tests performed for medical application purposes
• Goal 4: Develop common policies for access to genomic databases for federally sponsored programs

What can personalized medicine give to the world according to The Age of Personalized Medicine?

• improved diagnoses
• more efficient drug development
• better medical outcomes
• earlier interventions

If you would like to watch some mind-blowing presentations, check out the ITMAT Symposium page!

Here is the story of the week from Nature about a father who wanted to know what was wrong with his daughter. He had his daughter’s DNA sequenced, then compared it to the human reference sequences in GenBank. His notebooks are not the only record of the journey into his daughter’s DNA as he logged everything at mydaughtersDNA.org. This is a must-read!

As far as I’m concerned, there is only one paper that dedicates articles totally to personalized genetics. You should read Gene patents and personalized medicine in Future Medicine.

Even if gene-related patents are helpful in fostering pharmacogenetic discoveries, will their positive effects sufficiently compensate for the resultant limitations on the number of test providers and the associated increases in costs? The answer is probably no. The expense of pharmacogenetic testing relative to the utility of the information provided is among the chief obstacles to its routine incorporation into medical practice.

An electronic health record system would be crucial to personalized health care, so Gruntdoc tells us about Google chases Microsoft over online personal health records and there is an interesting survey as well:

The ISO-HL7 PHR International Survey team invites to participate in a survey of the international uses of Personal Health Records and Personal Health Informatics. The goal of this survey is to inform and update the standards-development community of the current needs, desires, and trends surrounding the electronic Personal Health Record (PHR).

Further reading:

• Personalized Medicine: Oncogenetics
• Personalized Medicine: Who would you like to have access to your genetic test results?
• Personalized Medicine: The Future is Now
• Science Magazine: The future of personalized genomics
• Personalized Medicine: Health and Information Technology
• Personalized Medicine: Major steps on the way
• Personalized Genetics: DNA 2.0 and the best thoughts on our genome
• Personalized Medicine: being up-to-date
• Individualized Genomics: Update