Genomic Medicine, through the application of high-throughput sequencing, is changing the molecular diagnostic landscape. It is finding increasingly widespread application in clinical diagnostics of rare diseases and cancer, improving diagnostic yield, and shortening the time to diagnosis and the start of appropriate, at times personalised, treatment. It is envisaged that within the next decade genomics will also underpin clinical investigations of common complex diseases. With the emerging gene-specific and mutation-specific therapies, genomics will, in time, supplant even other non-molecular diagnostics.

A Policy Meeting on Genomics in Medicine was organized by TrainMALTA was held on 29 September 2017 at the University of Malta Valletta Campus. This policy meeting brought together leading academic scientists and researchers, consultants, and policy makers with a series of presentations and open discussion surrounding policy making in a genomics era.

This Policy Meeting addressed four main points:

• Informed consent, counselling and engaging patients and the public in an open dialogue
• The benefits that clinical genomics can bring to patients, particularly patients with rare
• diseases and cancer
• Ethical, legal and social issues
• Handling genomic data securely, and how it can be accomplished within the remits of data protection

View the course programme.  

Presentations

Professor Kathleen Freson - The Genome test result: What do I tell my patients and why?  
Dr Rolf Apweiler - EMBL-EBI, ELIXER and Health Data