Metabolic Profile in Personalized Medicine

Eddy Karnieli, MD
Director, Institute of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
RAMBAM Health Care Campus
Haifa 31096, ISRAEL

2:00pm Wednesday, 22 june 2011, ITE 325b, UMBC

Personalized Medicine is revolutionizing the medical world. Understanding and integrating genetic and molecular information with traditional clinical knowledge is the hallmark of this transformation. Currently, much of the medical practice is based on standards of care derived from the epidemiologic studies of large cohorts. These studies do not take into account the individual's genetic, proteomic, and metabolic characteristics. Hence, the gap continues to grow between knowledge accumulated from basic scientific and clinical research, newly discovered molecular mechanisms and therapeutic guidelines, and their implementation at the patient’s bedside. Diabetes is the most common metabolic disease, and its complications have a significant economic impact on the health system. Prediction of diabetes in asymptomatic patients as well as its harsh complications in patients already diagnosed is becoming a necessity, with the considerable increase in the cost of the treatment. Thus, in the current presentation I will review some of the clinical, molecular, metabolic and genetic biomarkers that should be integrated in a future bio-informatic platform and decision support system to be used at the point of care and discuss the challenges we face in applying this vision of personalized medicine in diabetes into reality. Metabolic Profile in Personalized Medicine.

Professor Eddy Karnieli is a graduate of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion– Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He obtained clinical training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Rambam Medical Center and did his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Diabetes, Obesity and Endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego and at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at the Rambam Medical Center. Professor Karnieli's main research interests are the molecular mechanisms for regulating cellular glucose uptake and transporters and their implications in diabetes, obesity and insulin resistance; Gene therapy modalities to trans-differentiate human cells toward beta-cells as a potential cure for type 1 diabetes; Medical informatics, telemedicine and personalized medicine. He has published about 70 peer reviewed papers and reviews.Professor Karnieli serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals and review boards. Professor Karnieli is a retired Colonel from the Israel Defense Forces Medical Corps and is a former Deputy Director of the Rambam Medical Center.

Host: Professor Yelena Yesha