>> I'm going to hope that everyone can hear me okay.
So first off, I would just like to welcome everybody
to the 12th annual bootcamp for science writers.
My name is James Berger.
I'm the director of
the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences
here at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
And I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today.
It's not the press club, my apologies
but we do the best we can in the times that we have.
So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen
at this point to get us started.
So let's do that up.
Okay, I'm hoping that everyone can see that all right.
And I will go ahead and start the slideshow.
All right, well, again, welcome, thank you for joining us.
So as many of you know, we sponsored this annual event
for journalists and science writers.
This is our, this year we're going to be focusing
on precision medicine and this is an area
that's acutely important for human health and wellbeing
including in the COVID-19 crisis
that we currently find ourselves in as well
as future such challenges that will undoubtedly arise.
So to get us started when I thought I would do
is I would give just a brief introduction
to the topic precision medicine.
And before I do that, I would like to first start off just
by explaining a little bit about what
the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences is,
or IBBS as we sometimes call it.
So the IBBS is basically a collective
of nine basic science departments housed
within The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
We have approximately 150 primary faculties
in the institute.
And we have a range of departments,
as you can see on the screen here
that go from studying biophysics and biochemistry
to the studies of genetics and cell biology
and bioengineering, neuroscience, et cetera.
It's a quite diverse group.
And one of the strengths of the IBBS is that it lets us go
all the way from the study of individual atoms and molecules
to the study of cells, to tissues, to organs
and find the organisms and so we can really put together
a very broad swath of research talents together
on challenging biomedical problems.
Now, within the IBBS, we are home to approximately half
of the PhD candidates here
at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
and our basic sciences faculty
are charged with teaching nearly all of
the fundamental preclinical courses
for School of Medicine, medical students.
Our primary mission is really
to uncover basic science concepts that will allow us
to drive clinical advances.
So we are very much a foundational enterprise,
but at the same time, by being embedded within
the School of Medicine, we're quite tied
and acutely aware of human health needs.
Now the purpose of bootcamp are many fold.
One is it's to give you a chance to spend a day of learning
with our experts on, again, the topic that we choose
at any given year.
We can well down into
the knowns and unknowns particular health topic.
Again, today is going to be focused on precision medicine.
And one of the reasons we feel this particular get together
is really quite important is because we understand
that your role is science writers and journalists
is quite vital to our discourse
and wellbeing here in the U.S.
It's you and your cohort that allow the general population
to distinguish science fact from science fiction.
We rely on you to help counteract with this investment
that we've been seeing increasingly
in the sciences over the years.
We rely on you to educate the populace.
I think most of you are aware that sometimes scientists
aren't always the best at communicating their discoveries
to the general public and we really need your help
in helping us achieve this goal.
And this is also important
so that we can inform public policy
and we can allow public policy makers to have work
from sound fact driven decisions and not from basically
their gut, if you will.
Okay, so what is precision medicine?
So precision in medicine,
really the goal is for a given individual to understand
how a particular disease arises in that individual,
predict the disease course
and tailor a particular remedy for that.
Now there's many variables that of course go into
how an individual might respond to either
a disease or a treatment.
There can be a variable such as preexisting conditions,
demographics, social determinants.
So these might be something more environmental for instance,
but then there can also be, what we sometimes refer
to as somewhat hardwired variables,
which might be your genetics,
the state of your proteome or metabolome.
You might've heard of things like the epigenome, et cetera.
So these are all a whole host of different classes
of variables that really determine how an individual
will respond to a particular type of disease
and also to its treatment.
And the reason that we get ill,
the reason we have health problems
is because our normal equilibrium, if you will,
all these sort of confluent factors
somehow get thrown into disarray,
and it can be via pathogen,
such we are experiencing during this COVID crisis,
it can be by an acute injury,
it can be by poisoning from external sources,
all different kinds of things can go into perturbing
the disequilibrium that they give rise to the illness.
Now you might wonder how precision medicine relates
to traditional medicine and when we typically think
of medicine and how we treat it,
usually you have some type of disease,
that disease gets studied in some way.
This is where science comes in.
We try to figure out what's
the underlying root cause of the disease.
We try to figure out how it might counteract
the symptoms that are brought on by the disease
that leads to some kind of treatment,
often in the form of a pharmaceutical that not always.
and then of course, this is then applied
to the population that happens to have that disease.
The goal of precision medicine is to frankly tailor
this in a more precise way so that instead
of just having one treatment
or a one size fits all for a population,
you would have an individual that has a particular disease
and aspects of that individual, again, their genetics,
their proteome, their environment, et cetera,
feed back into the science
so that science can help clinicians basically formulate
a treatment, which is really, again,
tailored to that individual and so it has a higher efficacy
or highly higher likelihood of being efficacious
or working down the road.
Of course, one individual is different
from another individual so the next individual
will have different characteristics
and so will require slightly different treatments.
and the third individual will require
yet something different again and so on and so forth, right?
And this is why science and research are not just central
to this process, but even more central
than in the traditional disease models,
because we really have to get a good picture,
a good view of what an individual's snapshot, if you will,
or state looks like before we can start to think about
how we might develop this particular treatments.
And I think the current crisis we're going through right now
with COVID-19 really exemplifies where
we would like precision medicine to go.
And I think you've all read or been involved indeed
in writing, various stories, such as the following.
You might have a shared household with a number
of individuals, we'll just say this,
four COVID positive individuals here.
So they all have tested positive for COVID.
They all have been infected by the SARS-CoV-2.
But two of these individuals might be totally asymptomatic
and have no clue that or that they're really even infected.
One might come down with some severe rash
or some sort of external symptom that's uncomfortable
but not necessarily life threatening.
And the fourth might actually end up in the hospital
on a ventilator system because of how they responded, right?
And the question we want to know, and indeed right now
there's a number of scientists trying to sort this out,
is why, why is this so many differences?
Why are there so many differences in how individuals respond
to this one virus?
And this really is where we have to have science
to help bring us in and understand,
what the knowledge is what the virus does and how it does it
and why humans respond the way they do
and why one particular treatment
work well in one individual,
but not work so well on a different individual.
Okay, so with that, I'll stop the slide show
and I just wanna come back.
So we have a great lineup for today.
You're going to hear from basic and clinical scientists
who have integrated precision medicine efforts
into their research.
We will start with research ranging
from AI or artificial intelligence and imaging,
and implantable biosensors, the body's immune system,
designed therapies for childhood cancer et cetera.
And except for our first presenter,
most of the speakers today will have,
will be giving presentations of about 10 minutes.
You'll have the opportunity to ask them questions throughout
the Q and A feature of zoom
and the remaining five minutes of your time slots.