The Advent of Personalized Genomic Medicine

The Public Science Lectures

May 24, 2012 Boston University College of Arts & Sciences

John Quackenbush, Ph.D., Professor, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Harvard School of Public Health; Director, Center for Cancer Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Author, The Human Genome (2011)

Professor Quackenbush describes the great potential of today’s genomic research: a much deeper understanding of the kind of information the genome contains, and the medical applications that will result from that knowledge. He brings the latest developments on personal genomes and personalized medicine from the frontlines of genomic research. New technologies inspired by the Human Genome Project are poised to make “the $1000 genome” a reality. This has opened up new ways of studying human disease and has the potential to drive development of truly personalized genomic medicine. From micro-RNAs to epigenomic regulation, from single nucleotide polymorphisms to alternative splicing, we are discovering there is far more to our genomes than we imagined.