We are very excited about the upcoming Stanford Medicine X conference that is taking place right here in our backyard September 5-7th. The conference will explore the rapidly growing market at the intersection of technology and healthcare and how “emerging technologies will advance the practice of medicine, improve health, and empower patients to be active participants in their own care.”
George Asimenos, Director of Science & Clinical Solutions at DNAnexus will be speaking on Sunday, September 7th at 11:40am. His talk, titled “Open-source genomic analyses on open-source patients,” will question the traditional healthcare paradigm, where patients are regarded as precious entities whose information is sensitive and highly restricted. The Personal Genome Project, dedicated to making public genome, health, and trait data available to anyone for the greater good, has posed an interesting “open-source patient” model, where individuals publicly volunteer a vast amount of information about themselves, such as their name and age, their genomic information, as well as information on their conditions. By open-sourcing themselves, patients effectively open the doors to new collaborative models for medical research and medicine. Since their genomic data is readily available (and no other form of approval is required), anybody from interested scientists to genome hobbyists can download and analyze that data.
George will explore how the DNAnexus platform can be used to facilitate open-source genomic analyses on open-source patients and demonstrate how we combined cloud computing and advanced bioinformatics to analyze a real open-source patient. It’s an engaging talk that ultimately looks at how collaborative, crowdsourced online medicine may empower patients to go beyond webMD to learn about their health, and potentially disrupt the diagnostic model as it becomes more accessible for individuals to explore their genomes.
This year’s lineup of presentations and panels will surely ignite continued conversations after the event to inspire and challenge our thinking.
For more details on the conference, check out Stanford Medicine X (you can also watch the conference live by signing up for the Stanford Medicine X Global Access Program).
