Executive Vice President for Health Sciences Howard Federoff discussed the latest step in the evolution of medicine with members of the Medical Center faculty yesterday in the Medical and Dental Building.
Federoff, who assumed his role in April, said that Georgetown may be nearing a critical juncture in medicine.
“In 15 to 20 years, medicine will drastically change. An individual will come to a clinician because he feels well,” Federoff said. “The individual will be told what he’s at risk for, and told how to modulate the risk of diseases, so he doesn’t have to return clinically.”
This type of encounter, Federoff said, will be made possible under systems medicine, a derivative of newly explored systems biology. Federoff expressed enthusiasm for extending the methodology of systems biology to practiced medicine.
“Systems medicine focuses on the system, the whole person, and thus is very much in line with cura personalis,” he said.
According to the Institute for Systems Biology’s Web site, systems biology studies organisms in terms of networks and systems of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions rather than analyzing individual facets of the beings.
Federoff said that adopting this method would have vast implications, as it would require an entirely new Master’s program in systems medicine. According to Federoff, implementing such a program would put Georgetown at the forefront of educational reform.
“I’m looking at this as a series of incremental milestones,” he said.
Federoff said that some of these goals may be reached within the next five years, although there is no specific timetable in place.
To help begin these extensive changes, Federoff recently named Louis Weiner as director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown.
“Dr. Weiner’s rich experience aligns with our overall vision for Georgetown University Medical Center, which includes evolving the way we teach and practice medicine, and how we translate research from the lab bench to the patient bedside in order to offer the best patient care,” Federoff said.
The speech was sponsored by the Medical Center Office of Communications and the Office of the Executive Vice President.
