Advancements in healthcare at AACC 2023
Exploring microbiome-directed therapies, precision medicine with big data, health equity, and more
25 Jul 2023At the 2023 American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo. From July 23-27 in Anaheim, California, the meeting’s 250 plus sessions will deliver insights on a broad range of timely healthcare topics. Highlights include discussions about addressing childhood undernutrition using microbiome-directed therapies, harnessing the power of big data to practice precision medicine, creating more equitable healthcare systems, improving cardiovascular care for women, and using genomic-modification strategies to treat sickle cell disease.
Microbiome-Directed Therapies for Childhood Undernutrition. Scientists are exploring whether disruptions to the normal development of the human gut microbiome — a collection of microbes in the gastrointestinal tract — could play a role in causing childhood undernutrition. In the meeting’s opening plenary, Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon discusses the possibility of developing microbiome-directed therapies to address this devastating global health problem. Dr. Gordon is the 2023 Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Awardee and founding director of The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Practicing Precision Medicine from 700 Trillion Data Points. Over the past decade, researchers and clinicians have measured trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data that could be harnessed to improve disease diagnostics and therapeutics. In this plenary session, Dr. Atul Butte, chief data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, highlights his center’s recent work on integrating electronic health records data from over 8 million patients and discusses how such big data could help providers to practice more precise medicine.
Choosing Equity in Healthcare. Dr. Thea James, vice president of mission, associate chief medical officer, and co-executive director of the Health Equity Accelerator at Boston Medical Center, will share how one academic healthcare system approached an enterprise-wide transformation toward organizational equity.
Addressing Cardiovascular Disease in Women. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for U.S. women, yet the underrepresentation of women in medical research has led to pervasive sex-based gaps in knowledge and care delivery. In this plenary session, Dr. Nanette K. Wenger, professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine, called for a cultural shift toward equity, including awareness campaigns that identify cardiovascular disease as the major health threat for women.
Advances in Curative Therapies for Sickle Cell Disease. In the meeting’s closing plenary, Dr. Mark C. Walters, chief of the hematology division and professor of pediatrics/hematology at the University of California, San Francisco, will discuss diverse new approaches for addressing sickle cell disease that apply genomic modifications to patients’ cells to elicit a therapeutic effect. He will present examples of both promising results and pitfalls, while also exploring how to ensure equitable access to these new therapies.