[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Dan Rhoden and welcome to this course on personalized medicine. [MUSIC] I'm a faculty member at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where I've spent the last three plus decades as an investigator and as a physician. Here at Vanderbilt, we made an institutional commitment to the concept of personalized medicine, largely around the genetics of variable drug response, although that vision is now expanding into disease susceptibility as well. We made that commitment about ten years ago. Part of the reason we made that commitment is because of the long standing tradition of excellence in clinical pharmacology. Another part of that reason is the longstanding commitment to information science, and particularly to the way in which we use varied information across many, many genes, and couple that to the electronic medical record. Something that we'll talk about in this course. The reason that I'm teaching this course is that I think we've seen an explosion In our understanding of the concepts of personalized medicine over the last decade. That explosion has come along with the ability to sequence patients and generate large volumes of genetic data, as well as our understanding of the way in which genes affect our disease susceptibility. Many patients come to us for many conditions, and they take many, many different medicines, and the potential for interaction across diseases and across drugs is great. And so the idea is a personalized medicine is to do the best we can based on the evidence that we have, be it from genetics or be it from large clinical trials to deliver the best of individual loss care for that patient. [MUSIC] The main target audience for this course are physicians who have been in practice for five or more years. Those physicians are increasingly exposed to the concepts of personalized medicine, and genomic base personalized medicine. But don't have the medical school background that enables them to critically look at the literature and understand when it is important to apply that information. And when it may not yet be important to apply that information. Now that's the main target audience but of course, other physicians, medical students, other healthcare professionals, undergraduate students, interested members of the life public are all welcome to take the course. There will be a couple of introductory, modules around the fundamental principles of personalized medicine. The history of personalized medicine, the history of genetics. But the majority of the course are modules based on individual cases and individual examples that highlight specific genetic variance that may be important, or are important for the care of individual patients. And we'll end the course by some modules looking towards the future. The course itself will be a total of six weeks. There will be quizzes. There will be discussions. And there will be a final project at the end of the course. So welcome to this course on Personalized Medicine. I look forward to having you participate in this course, and hope that you get something great out of it. Thank you. [MUSIC]