Thomas Werner
Adjunct professor,University of Michigan,USA
Title: Turning P4-Medicine into reality goes way beyond medicine
Biography
Biography: Thomas Werner
Abstract
Preventive, predictive, personalized, and participatory medicine (P4-medicine) requires science, medicine, judicial, ethics, and the general public, including politics to cooperate. Only broad consent and support will allow making the necessary changes to our existing health care system. This will not only ensure better medical treatment for many of us, but also offers unique opportunities to combine improved health care with economic saving, mostly coming from the first part - preventive medicine. Challenges are the acquisition of large amounts of molecular data (genome sequences, tumor genomes, transcriptomes, and an ever growing amount of biomarkers) from patients and also from the healthy population. Once sufficient data are available, suitable consent forms must accompany them in order to allow comparative analysis on a sufficiently large scale. Especially the interpretation of -omics data still presents formidable problems we need to overcome, as will be illustrated in just one example. Results need to be stored and safeguarded properly in order to fulfill legal and ethical requirements of data protection. However, current limitations are often decades old and entirely oblivious of the requirements and possibilities of P4-medicine. Here we need sufficient general education to ensure that politician can remove some obstacles in tune with their electorate. This includes health care providers who often see P4-medicine just as another huge attack on their budgets. They need to realize the saving potential especially in prevention and early treatment of chronic diseases. We need viable economic models to demonstrate these effects as real. I will summarize what our association is doing in detail to help facilitate to required change of mind sets in order to make P4-medicine a reality for all of us