The Promise of Personalised Medicine. – hope or hype
Presentation by Professor Don Chalmers
QVMAG – Inveresk
2:00 pm Sunday, 28th July 2013.
Admission: $5 General Public, $3 Friends of the Museum, $2 Students
Free for members of the Royal Society of Tasmania
To assist us with the organization of this event RSVP by Thursday 25 July : Email bookings@qvmag.tas.gov.au or telephone 6323 3798
Brief Abstract of the Talk
Francis Collins – one of the chief architects of the Human Genome Project and now director of the National Institutes of Health in the USA – in his book Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine – presents a more hopeful vision of the future of medicine compared with the disorder of our current health-care system. This vision is of personalised medicine where most people have their whole genome sequenced (WGS) and their results integrated with their personal decisions about diet, lifestyle, healthcare and treatments.
In the pharmaceutical area, personalised medicine aims, based on an individual’s genetic profile, to develop new drugs, to better match drugs to the individual patient and to minimise adverse drug reactions for individual patients. In genetic testing, there is an increasing range of direct–to-customer (DTC) tests available, which have raised concerns amongst other national regulatory authorities. A PHG Foundation Research Report in 2008 concluded that a failure to improve clinical evaluation of genetic tests will undermine the development of personalised medicine.
This address will discuss the hopes and hype in personalised medicine and whether the future of personalised medicine may depend on developing new ethical and legal standards to ensure public trust and confidence in personalised medicine.
About the Speaker
Professor Don Chalmers is Dean of the Law School and Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania. He is Director of the Centre for Law and Genetics and Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.
Professor Chalmers is Chair of the Gene Technology Ethics and Community Consultative Committee and Deputy – Chair of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Licensing Committee.
He is a member of the international Human Genome Organization Ethics Committee and of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.
Professor Chalmers was chair of the NHMRC Australian Health Ethics Committee from 1994-2000 and is the author of many publications related to gene research and bioethics.
