The Centre for Personalised Medicine (CPM)
The Centre for Personalised Medicine is a partnership between the University of Oxford's Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and St Anne's College, Oxford. It is a communication, engagement and research vehicle for students, academics, clinicians, the public and policy makers to explore the benefits and challenges of personalised medicine.
The Centre's principal aim is to explore personalised medicine from a range of perspectives. To this end, it coordinates a wide range of events (both online and in-person) and activities including seminars, conferences, public lectures, blog posts, vlogs and podcasts.
To find out a bit more about us you can read our Annual Reports, or watch this video to meet some of the team.
What is Personalised Medicine?
Personalised medicine is a broad field that aims to use what we can measure about individuals to inform healthcare. To some extent, medicine has always been personalised. There has been a recent explosion in the amount of data that we generate for individuals; personalised medicine addresses how we can use this vast array of data to more effectively diagnose and treat patients, as well as predict disease risk in the population.
For example, we know that some people are more susceptible to certain diseases, or to having specific health issues. When we try to treat these conditions, some individuals respond better to certain drugs and therapies. Understanding the reasons for this variability, whether it be underlying biology, socioeconomic factors or environmental influences, can help identify the best drug to give to the right patient, and / or highlight strategies to prevent disease in vulnerable communities. Using individual-level data on millions of molecular and physical measures may help us improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment for groups of individuals.
Whilst we believe that personalised medicine is hugely powerful when done right, it also raises significant clinical, ethical, legal, economic and societal challenges. It is both these benefits and challenges that the CPM is here to discuss.
Please email cpm@well.ox.ac.uk to be added to our mailing list.
The Centre for Personalised Medicine is delighted to announce a further 7 years of financial support by the Dr Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation. A signing ceremony took place in February to mark the funding agreement. Pictured (L-R) are: Professor Anneke Lucassen, Director of the CPM, Ian Huen, representing the Dr Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation, Dame Mary Archer, alumna of the College and Chair of the CPM's External Advisory Board, Helen King, Principal of St Anne's College and Professor John Todd, Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics.
