Dana C. Crawford, PhD, presented in HudsonAlpha’s seminar series about some of the current challenges and opportunities in precision medicine — the term used for medicine specifically tailored to a patient, often through analysis of their genetics. Crawford comes to HudsonAlpha from the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology.
Crawford outlined a unique moment of opportunity for precision medicine, characterized by accelerated genomic discoveries, cost-effective clinical sequencing and broadly expanded use of electronic health records. These factors are bolstered by the first effort to establish a national research cohort through the All of Us program, which aims to gather health data from more than one-million people in the US.
One challenge facing researchers currently is the variation between different electronic health record systems. Crawford detailed one effort in Cleveland to get healthcare providers to map their health records onto a single data model, allowing ease of comparison across recordkeeping systems. By assembling a dataset in this way, scientists could easily pull up a relevant, anonymized group of health records for a wide variety of parameters, empowering research and allowing for the development of far more specific and effective treatment regimens.
This seminar was hosted by Greg Cooper, PhD.
More information on HudsonAlpha Research Seminars, including the upcoming schedule, can be found at hudsonalpha.org/seminars.