On September 30th 2014, Lee Kong Chian Medicine hosted Prof Jeremy K. Nicholson, Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer, Director of MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre, to deliver a guest lecture entitled ‘The Challenges of Implementing Precision Medicine Approaches in A Changing World’ to the audience in Singapore.
In the lecture, Prof Nicholson highlighted the important interactions in gene and environment which could eventually determine the disease risks in individuals and the associated therapeutic interventions. He also pointed out that the urban lifestyle and environment dramatically changes disease pattern and the types of genetic complexity which may impact treatment efficacy.
Prof Nicholson continued to elaborate about the importance of the understanding of human bio-complexity and gene-environment interactions. He further showed some data on how phenotype and metabolic complexity can be unravelled through advanced technology such as exploiting new spectroscopy system approaches as well as molecular pathology. Prof Nicholson envisages that the future healthcare can be better achieved by precision medicine through recording/collecting patients’ phenotyping at each intervention stage incorporating advanced medical technologies such as mass spectroscopies and NMR systems. He also took the opportunity to introduce the real time diagnostics tools developed in his lab i.e. i-Knife and i-Endoscope and their applications in aiding physicians/surgeons in making quick and accurate clinical decisions in emergency situation and also accessing the “prioritisation” of donor transplantation based on patients’ survivorship prediction.
The very stimulating and inspiring seminar was well received by researchers from NTU and A*STAR institutes and industry.