Jeremy K. Nicholson will deliver the 2013 SOT Annual Meeting MRC Lecture, “Phenotyping the Patient Journey: Making Systems Medicine Work in the Real World,” on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, from 8:00 am to 9:00 am in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Nicholson is head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London. He also is a consultant for many pharmaceutical/healthcare companies in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, and is a founder and director of Metabometrix, an Imperial College spin-off company specializing in molecular phenotyping, clinical diagnostics, and toxicological screening via metabonomics and metabolomics.
The abstract of this lecture states that “Systems biology tools can be applied at both individual and population levels to understand integrated biochemical function in relation to disease pathogenesis. Metabolic phenotyping offers an important window on systemic activity and both advanced spectroscopic approaches can be used to characterize disease processes and responses to therapy. There is now wide recognition that the extensive cross-talk and signalling between the host and the symbiotic gut microbiome links to both the responses to therapy and disease risk factors and indeed these also modulate drug toxicity. Such symbiotic supraorganismal interactions greatly increase the degrees of freedom of the metabolic system that poses significant challenges to fundamental notions on the nature of the human diseased state, the aetiopathogenesis of common diseases, and current systems modelling requirements for personalized medicine...Such population risk models and biomarkers can also feedback to individual patient healthcare models thus closing the personal and public healthcare modelling triangle.”
Dr. Nicholson has won many accolades and international prizes for his work, which spans three decades, and is the author of over 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers and many other articles/patents on the development and application of novel spectroscopic and systems biology approaches to the investigation of disturbed metabolic processes in complex organisms. He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2010 and currently holds honorary professorships at eight overseas universities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is on the editorial board of eight international scientific journals.
Dr. Nicholson will be holding a discussion with postdoctoral and graduate student SOT members following his lecture. This will be a ticketed event, limited to 40 participants.