On May 29^th Westlake International Conference on Personalized Medicine and the 49^th Zhejiang University Westlake Academic Forum were held in Hangzhou. More than 100 experts from China, American, Japan and so on attended the conference and deliberated on the research into the personalized medicine and its development.

Personalized Medicine is the concept that managing a patient's health should be based on the individual patient's specific characteristics, including age, gender, height/weight, diet, environment, etc. Recent developments in genetic testing allow the development of "Genomic Personalized Medicine" and Predictive Medicine, which is the combination of comprehensive genetic testing with proactive, personalized preventive medicine. Personalized medicine is not solely about genomics, however, as personalized medicine is about you, the health consumer. Personalized medicine also allows your health care provider, such as your physician, to focus their attention on what makes you, instead of abiding by generalities. Personalized medicine is a reform in the development of modern medicine and it has been drawing every country’s attention since it was put forward.

In the conference Professor Leroy Hood, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineering, initiator of the Human genome project (HGP) and president of Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, USA, Professor Jianren Gu, (Academician, China), State Key Laboratory for Oncogenes and Related Genes, Cancer Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, and Professor Lanjuan Li (Academician, China), State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Hangzhou, China delivered respectively the keynote speech ‘Systems Medicine, Transforming Technologies and the Emergence of P4 Medicine (predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory)’, ‘Systemic Regulation and Cancer Development and Progression’ and ‘Liver Failure and Artificial Liver Support System (ALSS) in China’. The conference was composed of 5 plenary sessions, 6 parallel sessions and 1 special session, including 35 full-paper presentations. The participants exchanged their views on research achievements and development trends of personalized medicine in genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, pharmacy and trophology, especially on the tendency of personalized medicine in the next 5-10 years.

The conference was hosted by Zhejiang California International Nanosystems Institute, State Key Laboratory for Oncogenes and Related Genes, Cancer Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, the First Affiliated Hospital of Medical School of Zhejiang University. Professor Zhaohui Wu, vice-president of Zhejiang University, addressed the conference in the opening ceremony.