On Saturday, March 19 at 2 p.m. at the Community Center, we’ll be discussing the rapid shift towards personalized medicine and how we, in Boothbay, can take advantage of this trend. Precision Medicine is an approach to discovering and developing medicines and vaccines that deliver superior outcomes for patients, by integrating clinical and molecular information to understand the biological basis of disease. These new treatments are focused on a particular sub-group of patients with certain genotypic and/or phenotypic characteristics that make them more likely to benefit, or less likely to experience side effects. In 2014, President Obama launched a Precision Medicine Initiative.

Now, the National Institute of Health has a funded program to collect electronic health records, blood samples, and genetic material from 1 million volunteers across the country. This information will be maintained securely and anonymously and will be used by researchers and clinicians to speed the detection, prevention, and treatment of cancer, diabetes, auto-immune system diseases, and many other conditions.

Patty Seybold of the Empowered Patients group will provide an overview, with videos, of the Precision Medicine Initiative 1 Million People Cohort Program and lead a discussion about the pros and cons of becoming engaged in this initiative. She will also provide a brief overview of similar programs in the UK, Iceland, and Estonia. In Iceland, over the past 15 years, 1/10th of the population's genomes have been sequenced and analyzed, providing health breakthroughs that have benefited both the entire population of Iceland, but also people all around the world. TheEstonian Genome Projectis a population-based biological database and biobank which was established in 2000 to improve public health in Estonia. It contains health records and biological specimens from 52,000 adults. Its goal is to collect genealogical, genome and health data from 5 percent of the population. The UK's National Health Service has been implementing the UK's 100,000 Genome Project since 2012. 

Many Boothbay area cancer patients have already experienced the benefits of breakthroughs in molecular medicine—with highly targeted treatments that have improved their outcomes and reduced the negative side effects of cancer treatment. The field of precision medicine is moving very fast, and it’s something we all need to be aware of, both for our own health and in terms of career opportunities for the next generation.

We’ll educate ourselves about this exciting frontier in the future of medicine and talk about ways in which we could benefit, both as individuals and as an entire community. This interactive presentation and discussion is sponsored by the Empowered Patients Study Group of the Boothbay Region Health & Wellness Foundation. This informative free meeting is open to the public and will run from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Conference Room A (first room on the left) at the Community Center in the Meadow Mall (next to the Family Dollar store).