The practice of personalized health care might be closer than it seems. Speaking as the latest installment of the OSU Department of Statistics Chhotey Lal and Mohra Devi Memorial Lecture Series, Dr. Gregory Campbell discussed the promise of individualized medical care tailored to each patient. (Virtually attend Dr. Campbell's lecture)

Gregory Campbell, PhD

Video filmed and edited by Rachel Lynne Smith.

The discoveries of genetic and genomic information alongside developments such as the Human Genome Project have brought us closer but there is still work to be done, Dr. Campbell said. He currently leads a group at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that provides statistical support to the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and to the statistical reviews of the FDA’s pre-market device submissions.

During the seminar, Dr. Campbell spoke about the progress of personalized care since the mapping of the human genome. Because of its quick completion, he said expectations have been raised, which might lead to disappointment despite the advancements that have been made. He stressed patience and pointed to the amount of activity taking place that he said will soon pay off.

“It’s going to take a while for us to understand the biology and it’s going to take us a while to use statistics correctly … but it’s all doable and every day we make progress in this area,” Dr. Campbell said in an interview. “Its not going to be one miraculous instant, it’s going to be a lot of hard work by a lot of people.”

One of the examples in personalized health care that Dr. Campbell talked about was in vitro diagnostics utilizing multivariate index assays. These complex tests can be run to diagnose diseases or other conditions to yield a patient-specific result. Based on the type of genomic biomarker, some of the things the tests can do are predict breast cancer metastasis, identify the origin of a tumor based on a tissue sample, and monitor heart transplant patients or heart organ rejection based on blood samples.

Dr. Campbell discussed the need for an interdisciplinary effort from all the different fields in order to advance the goals of personalized health care. While each field faces its own difficulties, only a joint effort can help all sides truly understand and develop at the same time. As it stands, the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries are almost entirely non-intersecting.

“In order for this to move forward, we have to all learn about each other’s fields and learn to speak each other’s languages,” Dr. Campbell said. “That’s the way true collaborations work.”

With all of the developments that have occurred, Dr. Campbell said that personalized health care is already here and will accelerate in the future as we come to a better understanding of biology, develop more powerful informatics tools, and follow good principles for design and analysis.

“Wonderful things are happening … every day we learn a little more,” Dr. Campbell said. “The potential and promise is great.”

By Jeffy Mai, June 2, 2009

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