UCSF Magazine Focuses on Precision Medicine
The fall 2013 UCSF Magazine, which features the promise of precision medicine, is now available online.
UCSF began running the features in the print edition with this special web package titled “Harnessing the Power of Precision Medicine,” online.
Precision medicine is an emerging field that will transform how medicine is practiced and taught, how health care is delivered and financed and how research and development is conducted and regulated.
Precision medicine aims to harness the power of technology, genetics, imaging, patient health records, environmental data and biomedical research to better understand the root causes of disease, to develop targeted treatments and therapies and ultimately to provide personal, preventive, predictive and transformative care to patients everywhere.
One of the stories describes the new “MS Bioscreen” application – a team effort led by Pierre Antoine Gourraud and UCSF Department of Neurology Chair Stephen Hauser, MD, an international multiple sclerosis (MS) expert.
A prime example of clinical discovery, one of UCSF’s precision medicine pillars, the bioscreen enables clinicians to compare a particular MS patient to others with the same disease based on similarities in their clinical symptoms, brain imaging, and biomarker data. By viewing the outcomes of similar cases, each patient has a better idea of how he or she will eventually fare – and what can be done now to bring about the best possible outcomes later.
Coincidentally, Gourraud talks about his work in this week’s “Mission in a Minute” segment.
UCSF Magazine is published twice a year by the UCSF Office of University Development and Alumni Relations.