Less than a century ago, the discovery of new inherited diseases accelerated through clinical research and analysis. The advances in clinical medicine derived from these discoveries were among the compelling impetuses for the Human Genome Project, which aimed to identify the complete set of human genes and make them accessible for further biological study. In many ways, the scientific bounty from the project has been tremendous. However, the primacy of genomics as an explanatory or even causal approach to biology and medicine has been fundamentally limiting.
In this lecture, Isaac Kohane will illustrate how a knowledgeable and deep embrace of dialectic between genomics and phenomenology is needed to rapidly advance our understanding of human biology and accelerate clinical medicine. The synthesis that this embrace entails, he says, will strain our current modes of investigation and put a very high premium on multidisciplinary and quantitative training in biomedicine.
Speaker Bio:
Kohane is the inaugural chair of the department of biomedical informatics and the Marion V. Nelson professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales — from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism. Kohane’s i2b2 project is currently deployed internationally to over 120 major academic health centers to drive discovery research in disease and pharmacovigilance (including providing evidence on drugs that ultimately contributed to “boxed warning” by the FDA). Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored a widely-used book on microarrays for integrative genomics. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
