Summary

Personalised medicine is the next generation of healthcare research and delivery. It has potential to fundamentally affect the way healthcare is delivered while providing significant benefits to patients. This module aims to equip you, the next generation of scientists, with novel tools to be able to deliver personalised medicine both in the health sector and industry in the near future. In this module, you will learn how the use of individual's genetic and multi-omic profile will guide decisions about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease in the future and how to articulate and communicate progress in the field of personalised medicine to health and research professionals as well as the general public.

Learning outcomes and objectives

This module aims to equip you with the understanding of the basic principles of personalised medicine. You will learn how the development of new personalised diagnostic tests and the expanding use of biomarkers tailored to the individual enables the identification of the molecular cause of disease, and ultimately supports the development of novel, more precisely targeted treatments. You will learn the whole path from the use of multi-omics technologies for biomarker discovery and stratification of patients for clinical trials through to the use of pharmacogenetics for personalised drug use; how personalised medicine has become an important aspect in many branches of scientific research and medicine; the ethics behind personalised medicine, all with a strong emphasis on public communication.

On successful completion of the module, you will be able to understand:

1. Personalised care and 21st century healthcare and social movements in healthcare

2. The wide variety of biological and digital markers that signal increased or decreased risk of developing diseases and the use of multi-omics approaches for biomarker discovery;

3. The importance of the microbiome in personalised medicine;

4. Use of mobile health (medical devices) technologies to correlate activity, physiological measures and environmental exposures with health outcomes;

5. Importance of data sharing to improve patients’ health and social science;

6. Patients’ stratification to enable trials of targeted therapies;

7. Direct-to-consumer testing and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning;

8. The importance of scientific integrity and scientific communication to the patient;

9. How personalised medicine is becoming increasingly embedded in scientific research through scientific case studies;

10. Ethical considerations in personalised medicine;

Who is this module for?

This is a compulsory module for the MSc Personalised Medicine and Novel Therapies and optional module for MSc Cell and Gene Therapy and MSc Precision Medicine. This module is open to all with an interest in personalised medicine and science communication for the public. Note that attendance at discussion groups is mandatory so please check your timetable before committing to this module.

Teaching and Learning method

The module is aimed to be highly interactive with a blend of taught lectures and interactive applied case studies, interactive activities and discussion groups, self-taught sessions, tutorial and practices (i.e. relevant database searches) and will be taught in two sessions (three days in term 1 and three days in term 2) to give students ample time for reflection on what they have learnt in term 1 and the formative assessment and to apply knowledge in term 2 in preparation for the summative assessment.

Selected reading list

1. https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/improving-outcomes-personalised-medicine.pdf

2. Collins FS, Varmus H. A new initiative on precision medicine. N Engl J Med. 2015 Feb 26;372(9):793-5 (PMID 25635347)

3. Kenny J, Forsythe E, Beales P, Bacchelli C. Toward personalized medicine in Bardet-Biedl syndrome. Per Med. 2017 Sep;14(5):447-456. (PMID: 29754569)

4. Doble B, Harris A, Thomas DM, Fox S, Lorgelly P. Multiomics medicine in oncology: assessing effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and future research priorities for the molecularly unique individual. Pharmacogenomics. 2013 Sep;14(12):1405-17. (PMID: 24024894)

5. Tebani A, Afonso C, Marret S, Bekri S. Omics-Based Strategies in Precision Medicine: Toward a Paradigm Shift in Inborn Errors of Metabolism Investigations. Int J Mol Sci. 2016 Sep 14;17(9). (PMID: 27649151)

6. Chen R, Mias GI, Li-Pook-Than J, Jiang L, Lam HY, Chen R, Miriami E, Karczewski KJ, Hariharan M, Dewey FE, Cheng Y, Clark MJ, Im H, Habegger L, Balasubramanian S, O'Huallachain M, Dudley JT, Hillenmeyer S, Haraksingh R, Sharon D, Euskirchen G, Lacroute P, Bettinger K, Boyle AP, Kasowski M, Grubert F, Seki S, Garcia M, Whirl-Carrillo M, Gallardo M, Blasco MA, Greenberg PL, Snyder P, Klein TE, Altman RB, Butte AJ, Ashley EA, Gerstein M, Nadeau KC, Tang H, Snyder M. Personal omics profiling reveals dynamic molecular and medical phenotypes. Cell. 2012 Mar 16;148(6):1293-307. (PMID: 22424236)

7. Aronson SJ, Rehm HL. Nature. 2015 Oct 15;526(7573):336-42. doi: 10.1038/nature15816. Building the foundation for genomics in precision medicine. Emerging application of genomics-guided therapeutics in personalized lung cancer treatment.

8. Zaman A, Bivona TG. Ann Transl Med. 2018 May;6(9):160. doi: 10.21037/atm.2018.05.02. Review. PMID:29911108

9. van Vollenhoven RF. Genotypes, phenotypes and treatment with immunomodulators in the rheumatic diseases. J Intern Med. 2018 Jun 16. doi: 10.1111/joim.12800. [Epub ahead of print] Review. PMID:29908080

10. Hampel H, Vergallo A, Giorgi FS, Kim SH, Depypere H, Graziani M, Saidi A, Nisticò R, Lista S; Alzheimer Precision Medicine Initiative (APMI). Precision medicine and drug development in Alzheimer's disease: The importance of sexual dimorphism and patient stratification. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2018 Jun 12. pii:

S0091-3022(18)30048-7. doi: 10.1016/j.yfrne.2018.06.001. [Epub ahead of print] Review.

11. Tasian SK.Acute myeloid leukemia chimeric antigen receptor T-cell immunotherapy: how far up the road have we traveled? Ther Adv Hematol. 2018 Jun;9(6):135-148. doi: 10.1177/2040620718774268. Epub 2018 May 17. Review. PMID:29899889

12. Musunuru K, Sheikh F, Gupta RM, Houser SR, Maher KO, Milan DJ, Terzic A, Wu JC; American Heart Association Council on Functional Genomics and Translational Biology; Council on Cardiovascular Disease in the Young; and Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing. Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells for Cardiovascular Disease Modeling and Precision Medicine: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circ Genom Precis Med. 2018 Jan;11(1):e000043. doi: 10.1161/HCG.0000000000000043. Epub 2018 Jan 12. Review. PMID:29874173

 