Cambridge Healthtech Institute's 5th Annual Conference: impact of genomics on medicine

The recent publications in Nature and Science by the Human Genome Consortium and Celera Genomics, respectively, while being landmark achievements in themselves, have also given pause for thought. A definitive catalogue of human genes is still not available but the broad picture of how humans compare with lower organisms at the genomic level is becoming clearer. The full impact of these findings on the practice of medicine is hard to predict, but research being conducted now, in the early years of the 21st century, will form the basis of future advances in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Exactly what this will entail is the subject of intense debate, but there are some common starting points that were discussed at this meeting in Munich. The main theme to emerge was the need to move beyond the human genome sequence towards an understanding of proteins and their interactions in complex biological pathways, thereby increasing opportunities for drug discovery through the identification of new targets. The majority of the talks were therefore devoted to the description of technological advances in the analysis of gene and protein expression (and interaction) and in the use of various methods of gene deletion in order to validate individual proteins as drug targets. Perhaps it will still be a few years before it will be possible to report on the application of genomic analyses to routine medical practice at the first point of care for patients but when that happens, the research efforts described here will have been worthwhile.