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December 8, 2008
Predictive Health is event focus

By Holly Korschun

The fourth annual Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Symposium will highlight a new biomedical focus that integrates biology, behavior and environment, and emphasizes maintaining health rather than treating disease. The theme of the symposium is “Human Health: Molecules to Mankind.”

Major themes will include new ways of defining and measuring health, economic benefits of health promotion and disease prevention, the metabolic determinants of health, pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, and predicting health all the way from the laboratory to large population groups.

The two-day symposium will be held Dec. 15–16 at the Emory Conference Center.

The full agenda and registration are available at http://predictivehealth.emory.edu/symposium2008.cfm.
Keynote speakers include Ralph Snyderman, founder, Proventys, and chancellor for health affairs emeritus, Duke University, and Jeffrey Gulcher, chief scientific officer and co-founder, deCODE Genetics. The roster includes speakers from the Genetic Alliance, the Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center, 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 and health recovery rather than treatment of disease.

“Emory University is committed to national leadership in transforming health and healing through new ways of defining health, predicting disease risk, personalizing treatment and maintaining long-term well-being,” says Fred Sanfilippo, CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. “By combining advances in science, technology and translational research with health economics, public policy, business and ethics, we are developing innovative strategies to translate this new knowledge to individuals and populations as Emory plays a major role in the revolutionary changes that must and will occur in health care’s future.”

Sanfilippo will lead the symposium along with President Jim Wagner, Kenneth Brigham, director of the Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute, Chancellor Michael M.E. Johns, and Don Giddens, dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering.

Predictive Health and Society is a University-wide initiative within Emory’s strategic plan that includes Emory’s health sciences professional schools and centers, Emory College and Emory Graduate School and the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. The Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute includes more than 20 basic and translational research projects linked to a Center for Health Discovery and Well Being. The Center is a new approach to health and healing, located at Emory’s midtown campus at Crawford Long, enrolling individuals in a unique program to define and measure health, invent and discover optimal biomarkers of health, identify interventions and determine how to apply this new knowledge to make people healthier.