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tled Personalised Care, to be presented at the Medica Education Conference 2013 (21 November), Sir John will re-buff any cynicism over personalised medicine ever having a role in healthcare. He will outline just how genome analysis detects an individual’s genetic predisposition for certain diseases and how better assessment of their prognosis will play a greater role as personalised medicine takes the lead. Ahead of the Dusseldorf conference, during our European Hospital interview he said: ‘I need to get across to people that there has been a sea change technologically and that means there is now a real prospect of delivering a much more genetically-targeted form of healtha specific disease and on to exome sequencing to capture fragments of all the genes in the coding sequences. The ultimate step was to move to whole genome sequencing which has now fallen in price to a few thousand euros, Sir John said. Problems that he plans to identify during his address include incidental findings that suggest an individual is at risk of a genetic disorder and knowing how to tell them about it; and the need to acknowledge that subtle variations in gene expression – an area he believes is grossly under-estimated even by experts in the field – may be very important. ‘Subtle variation in gene expression in many of the common diseases will not be about gross loss of gene function but will be about a particular set of genes being slightly dis-regulated and causing a discord, which is very difficult to demonstrate unless you have the most subtle understanding of gene expression,’ Sir John emphasised. The professor also stated that interventions need not be expensive. For many years he has pioneered the use of Aspirin as a means of preventing cancer. ‘We proved in people at the highest genetic risk that taking two aspirins a day for two years cuts their risk of cancer by 60%,’ he pointed out. His keynote speech will conclude with a focus on the UK’s 100,000 Genome Project, which will sequence the personal DNA code of 100,000 patients over the next five years to help lead to better and earlier diagnoses and personalised care. He believes a major challenge is to encourage the European Union to embrace the initiative. ‘Personalised medicine is so important that it won’t be called personalised medicine,’ he said. ‘It will just be called medicine. It will be so integral to what we do.’ NB: Professor Sir John Burn’s keynote lecture on Personalised Medicine will be delivered at the Medica Education Conference 2013, in Dusseldorf, on 21 November 2013, at 1 p.m. in CCD South, Room 3. Genetically targeted medicine forges ahead