January 3, 2011

Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you have been hearing discussions about personalized medicine and/or individualized health in a variety of settings, and we want to update you on this exciting, emerging Johns Hopkins-wide initiative. We feel it will be helpful to you to understand where we are with this initiative, and where we are going, especially in light of an announcement that will be coming from the President soon about a gift to fund a new building on the Homewood campus where some of this work will take place.

A year ago, President Ron Daniels and School of Medicine Dean Ed Miller charged Provost Lloyd Minor, Dean of Engineering Nick Jones, and Kimmel Cancer Center Director Bill Nelson to articulate an institutional vision around individualized health, with an initial focus on cancer. They, in turn, convened five working groups that met numerous times over a six-month period. In all, 49 people spanning 18 disciplines at the university worked together to produce a white paper that described a new paradigm for the practice of medicine and how Hopkins would approach individualized health.

Ongoing discussions have engaged an even broader constituency across the institution, and these discussions are continuing. For example, in February we are scheduling two information sessions, one on the Homewood campus and one on the East Baltimore campus to open the dialogue to all who would like to participate. Individualized health was also a featured topic at the recent Volunteer Summit and at the November Rising to the Challenge event in Boston.

The working group meetings, in particular, have crystallized our institution's overarching goal: to use the many strengths of our institution in a collaborative and cohesive effort to create a platform for individualized health. All of us believe that—by working together—we can increase prevention and enhance early detection; develop more effective treatment interventions; and improve outcomes.

Our plan is to incorporate genomic and epigenomic information into our research and clinical practice in a rational and systematic way, bringing the best minds together to ask and answer the toughest questions. We will gather our statisticians, biostatisticians and computational biologists to work alongside laboratory researchers and clinicians to design more effective clinical studies, to analyze results, and to develop new treatments that will provide better outcomes and fewer side-effects. This approach will allow us to use detailed predictive information in order to select the right patients for new therapeutic and preventive interventions.

We have structured a pilot program within this initiative that will concentrate on personalized health for people with or at risk for cancer, and then we will address other complex health challenges. We firmly believe that Johns Hopkins is the place to establish an individualized health initiative. We are confident that, by working together, we will succeed.

Sincerely,

Martha N. Hill, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N.
Dean, School of Nursing

Nicholas P. Jones, Ph.D.
Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering

Michael J. Klag, M.D., M.P.H.
Dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Edward D. Miller, M.D.,
Frances Watt Baker, M.D., and Lenox D. Baker Jr., M.D.
Dean, Medical Faculty