igsp headline news Published by KENDALL MORGANThursday, November 29, 2012

An all-new edition of Genomic and Personalized Medicine promises to be a one-stop shop for doctors and other health professionals as they face the rapid growth of genetic and genomic testing in the clinic. The comprehensive resource volumes edited by the Duke Institute for Genomes Sciences & Policy's Geoffrey Ginsburg and Huntington Willard are one solution to an increasingly obvious problem: the healthcare workforce on the whole lacks the background to make personalized medicine a reality for patients.

The two-volume set is now available for purchase from Elsevier and Amazon.com as either a hard copy or Kindle Edition. The books can also be purchased electronically in whole or as individual chapters (for just over $30 a piece) from Science Direct, with institutional bulk rates available.

"These books directly connect to our goal of making the genome relevant to our patients and to society," Ginsburg said. "We took this project on because we saw a need to pull together all these bits of fragmented genomic information that could have a bearing on health and healthcare and put them in one place. There is nothing else like it."

The first book in the two-volume set covers everything from essential genome technologies and approaches to their ethical and societal implications and their translation to personalized medicine in the clinic. The second volume presents the latest developments in disease-based genomic and personalized medicine, with sections dedicated to cardiovascular disease, cancer, metabolic disease, mental health, and infectious disease. It's a soup-to-nuts resource intended for specialists in all medical disciplines, for research professionals, and for medical and graduate students alike.

"Once again, Ginsburg and Willard have recruited an impressive cast of geneticists and genomicists to contribute chapters spanning a wide spectrum of topics from fundamentals in genomics research to key clinical areas that represent some of the 'lowest hanging fruit' in terms of opportunities to have genomics change medical practice," writes Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Eric Green in the foreword. "Together, these chapters provide unequivocal evidence about the current state of genomic and personalized medicine that the opportunities are breathtaking, that the challenges are immense, and that the potential to improve health is nearly unlimited."

"This is the definitive textbook providing the content for a new era of medicine - an era where disease is defined at the molecular level rather than the anatomic level; where therapies are individualized and targeted rather than uniformly applied across a population," said Dietrich Stephan, President and CEO of Silicon Valley Biosystems and Co-Founder of Navigenics. "We have an opportunity with this text to improve patient outcomes using new tools and strategies, which is certainly an exciting prospect for each of us. This text should be mandatory reading for every physician, or physician in training."

Genomic and Personalized Medicine By the Numbers

2 Volumes 164 Contributors 1306 Pages 101 Chapters 63 New Chapters 245 Figures 49 Tables

Read more from the original source:
New Book on Genome and Personalized Medicine Preps Doctors for Changing Reality

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