8th. National Conference on Medical Sciences : “Medicine in the Genomic Era”

The role of genetics in medicine has been recognized for many years and further genetic research is to understand the gene functions and the gene interactions with the environment. These were made easier with the launching of the Human Genome Project whose aim is to decipher and decode the entire human genome and to understand their structure and functions. It will be beneficial to the biomedical research and the applications of genomic knowledge in the practice of medicine. The successful completion of the Human Genome Project has shown an impact on medicine. It supports the research to unravel the mysterious of human biology and provide wealth of new information for the clinicians to understand the diseases. These will help to develop new technologies for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of single gene disorders, complex disorders with the promise for new therapies. Large scale genotyping and short nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP’s) discoveries have shown why some individuals are susceptible to certain disease like diabetes, cancer, or suffers serious drug reactions. This knowledge of the genetic differences in an individual can change the management and treatment of the disease based on personal genetic make-ups such as drug response, influence and adverse reactions. This approach will lead to a personalized medicine in a near future. As such early identification and detection of pre-symptomatic individual at-risk as in cardiovascular medicine, hematology, oncology, gastroenterology, hepatology, psychiatry and psychology are in highly needed. Thus the challenges for the efficient incorporating of genomic in medicine are entirely on the intelligent use and application of the genetics information in the clinical practice and in creating the new health policy and public education. There are need for encouragement to educate the public and be proactive too in reducing the public anxiety and ignorance of the emerging genetic knowledge. The challenges in this genomic era are an exciting development of exploring the genome and intense research in transcriptomic, metabolomics, proteomics bioinformatics and drug discovery and development. With further technological advancement and genomic research we will expect more exciting progress in the applications of genomic in medicine.