Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology (Seattle), is going to hold a public lecture on Friday 3 December 2010.

The challenge for biology and medicine in the 21st century is the need to deal with its incredible complexity. In his lecture, Leroy Hood will focus on the efforts at a systems approach to disease, looking at prion disease in mice.

Systems approaches are both hypothesis-driven as well as discovery-driven. Hence the challenge in understanding biological complexity is that of using systems approaches to deciphering the operation of dynamic biological networks across three time scales of life: development, physiological and disease responses.

Leroy Hood will also discuss the emerging technologies that will transform medicine over the next 10 years, including next generation DNA sequencing, microfluidic protein chips, single-cell analyses and the capacity to generate stem cells for each individual patient. It appears that systems medicine, emerging technologies and powerful new computational and mathematical tools will transform medicine over the next 5-20 years from its currently reactive state to a mode that is proactive (P4) medicine that is predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory.

P4 medicine will have striking implications for healthcare costs as well as leading to a transformation of the healthcare industry. He will also talk about key ISB strategic partnerships, including that with Luxembourg, which will facilitate bringing P4 medicine to the patient.

•  When? Friday 3 December 2010 at 4 pm
•  Where?  Campus Limpertsberg, Bâtiment des Sciences, room B1.03

Leroy Hood has been the recipient of many prestigious honors over the years including the Lasker Prize (1987), the Kyoto Prize (2000), and the Kistler Prize, awarded for increasing the knowledge and understanding of the relationship between the human genome and society (2010). He was appointed as Invited Professor at the University of Luxembourg in 2010.