Predictive Health Symposium Features Advances in Biomarkers, Health Maintenance

The latest advances in predictive health will be featured at this year’s third annual Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Symposium, Dec. 17 and 18. Noteworthy speakers from a variety of health care fields will discuss progress in defining and measuring health, discovering health biomarkers, identifying interventions to optimize health and applying new knowledge to individuals and populations world-wide.

The two-day symposium will be held at the Emory Conference Center, 1615 Clifton Rd, Atlanta. The entire agenda and registration are available at http://predictivehealth.emory.edu.

Keynote speakers include Denis Cortese, MD, president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, who will discuss individualized medicine as the cornerstone of health care, and National Academy of Science member and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Helen Hobbs, MD, who will talk about genetic protection from coronary artery disease. The roster includes speakers from the NIH, University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt University and the CDC, in addition to scientists from Emory and Georgia Tech.

Predictive health is a new paradigm that defines the unique characteristics that predict disease risk for individuals and populations and uses new discoveries in biomedicine to emphasize health maintenance rather than treatment of disease.

“Emory is one of the few institutions that is at the leading edge in creating this revolutionary future of medicine,” says Fred Sanfilippo, MD, PhD, executive vice president for health affairs, CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and chairman of Emory Healthcare. “The Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute is building a new model of healthcare based on advances in science, technology and translational research combined with health economics, public policy, business and ethics.”

The theme of this year’s symposium is “Predictive Health--State of the Art: A Story in Four Parts,” with a first-day focus on defining and measuring health and discovering optimal biomarkers of health. On day two, presenters will discuss interventions to optimize health and ways to apply new knowledge to individuals and populations worldwide.

Emory President James Wagner, Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough and Emory Chancellor Michael Johns will introduce the symposium on Dec. 17. Dr. Sanfilippo will introduce the Dec. 18 program.

Speakers include Jeff Balser, Vanderbilt University; David A. Kindig, University of Wisconsin; Linda Bradley, Muin Khoury and William H. Dietz, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Teri Manolio, National Human Genome Research Institute; Alfred H. Merrill, Jr., Georgia Institute of Technology; Jonathan M. Samet, Johns Hopkins University; Colleen M. McBride, National Institutes of Health; and Mark Bouzyk, Kenneth L. Brigham, Marie E. Csete, Richard D. Cummings, Sue K. Donaldson, Paul M. Fernhoff, Michelle Lampl, Michael Johns, Fred Sanfilippo, Rani H. Singh and Mark E. Wilson, Emory University.

“New discoveries in science and technology are making it possible to understand health and how to maintain it at a level that we could not imagine even a decade ago,” says Kenneth Brigham, MD, director of the Predictive Health Institute. “We are learning more about human biology than ever, and translating that knowledge into health in the context of the entire human experience requires changes in how health care is practiced by health professionals and how health and its care is understood by everyone.”

The Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute combines a research core with a new Center for Health Discovery and Well Being -- a clinical testing ground for new predictive biomarkers of health, disease risk and prognosis aimed at keeping peop le healthy. More than 20 research projects already are underway in predictive health, including biomarkers to predict risk of cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, prediction of drug treatment toxicity, and predictive health modeling in early infancy.

The predictive health research program links the expertise of the systems biology program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and the Emory program in computational and life sciences.

Registration for the symposium is $25 for Emory faculty and staff, $10 for students, and $100 for non-Emory registrants, including materials and lunch, both days. For more information visit the website or call 404-686-6194.