Report on the pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine 2011 conference: part 1

The joint Wellcome Trust/Cold Spring Harbor Conference on pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, held in the UK and USA in alternate years, focuses on the opportunities presented by the growing contribution of genomic information and technologies to interdisciplinary approaches in the study of variable human responses to therapeutic agents. This year's meeting provided in depth discussions on diverse fields that are driving forward the new era of personalized medicine including the use of next-generation sequencing technologies to identify common and rare variants determining response to drugs; the interface of pharmacogenomics and complex disease, including cancer; understanding and managing serious adverse drug reactions and public health pharmacogenetics. This year's meeting followed the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network 2011 meeting (Cambridge, UK), and marked the Conference's tenth anniversary. In the first of this two-part conference report, sessions on personalized medicines, public health pharmacogenetics and next-generation sequencing will be discussed.