through genetic analysis, is part of what makes us unique and what we hold out to Pennsylvania and beyond as a reason to come to Penn Medicine. We’re investing in precision medicine leaders who will then foster the next generation of people and technologies that will make those diagnostic capabilities available to people on the East Coast.
Medicine, to be its partner in developing new forms of therapy. This represents a significant change in how drug development is done inside this country. I expect we’ll see more and more of these partnerships in the next 15 to 20 years. We really see this change as an opportunity for Penn Medicine to fill an important societal need. Jameson: The other strategy that we use at Penn is to collaborate across the schools and take advantage of the fact that Penn has many schools that are physically close to one another. For example, collaborations between the faculty at the medical school and the engineering school only require crossing Spruce Street. This allows us to think about how to use bioengineering or nanotechnology in medicine. Or we can easily collaborate with the vet school to explore early-stage research on new approaches to surgery or cancer. Having the nursing school embedded on the medical campus facilitates interprofessional education as well as collaborative research. The Leonard Davis Institute (LDI), has joined almost every school at Penn in health-care economists and policy.
20 ■ PENN MEDICINE
How is precision medicine affecting Penn Medicine? Muller: We’re investing heavily in precision medicine right now. Some of this investment comes from the genome project that Larry referenced earlier. We have made a conscious effort across our various disciplines to have leaders in personalized medicine. I’ll discuss two of them: Dr. David B. Roth, who leads our Center for Personalized Diagnostics, has been with Penn Medicine for about three years. The center is increasingly performing genetic testings, both within Philadelphia and now, for example, from China. We’ve also brought in a senior scientist from Merck, Dr. Gary Gilliland, vice dean for precision medicine, and his role is to foster all the parts of Penn Medicine that are making efforts in precision medicine. We really see our opportunity to be a world-leading individualized patient diagnostics center. By and large, patients come to a place like Penn Medicine not just for what we can do in a particular therapy, but also for how well we diagnose disease. Increasing that capacity to differentially diagnose through imaging, through pathology,
Jameson: When most people hear about a new effort in personalized medicine, they ask the question, “I thought medicine was always personalized?” So one of the things we have to do, as Ralph was explaining, is to define what we mean by personalized medicine or precision medicine. I think it’s an interesting contrast between our effort to take care of the population as a whole and to manage the individual patient. In the former, we have an obligation to make sure that preventive strategies and clinical pathways are put in place to ensure that everyone has access to the best practices in medicine. But at the same time, we know that every patient is indeed an individual who has a distinct past medical history and a current set of symptoms or diagnostic challenges. The point of precision medicine is to be able to efficiently make the right diagnosis for this individual patient and identify the optimal treatment for them. We believe this actually has the potential to also reduce costs in the future. With the Center for Personalized Diagnostics, the main effort is to make sure that a patient with lung cancer, for example, is not put on a chemotherapy regimen that will not work effectively but could still cause side effects. Why expose that patient to a treatment that’s not likely to be effective if instead we can identify a drug that may have better outcome and lower side effects? Muller: The investments we’ve made in electronic medical records have helped