“Healthcare is a trial and error industry…because the current pharma R&D model of blockbusters for broad patient groups is broken,” says Rita Lim-Wilby, Conference Director at PCI Pharma. “The solution is targeted therapeutics.”

That’s the premise of PCI Pharma’s “Advances Towards Personalized Medicine,” a one-day symposium, to be held at the Claremont Resort and Spa, Berkeley, California, on Thursday, November 19, 2009, featuring ten speakers from the University of California-Berkeley, Pfizer, CollabRx, Illumina, and six other leading organizations engaged in developing targeted therapeutics and companion diagnostics to transform healthcare.

Among the speakers: Jay M. Tenenbaum, Chairman, Founder and Chief Scientist of CollabRx, and Chairman and Founder of CommerceNet, will have “a conversation about healthcare, medicine, and what’s possible” with the audience*. He will focus on redesigning drug development and on his vision for the Health Commons, a collaboration between CommerceNet, Science Commons, Public Library of Science, and CollabRx designed to transform the pace and number of drug development projects by removing the barriers to knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Steven Brenner, founder of Genome Commons, UC Berkeley, will present an open source infrastructure to realize the transformative opportunities presented by the ready availability of genomic data. Through the Genome Commons, scientists will be able to predict the risk of particular diseases from an individual genome by comparison with known genomes for defined patient profiles and disease categories.

Adam Pavlicek, Senior Principal Scientist at Pfizer, will present a tumor classification system to predict new indications for existing cancer therapies, applying existing drugs to new tumor types to accelerate the number of treatable cancers.

More information: PCI Pharma, 858-344-0156, [email protected], lifescience.planetconnect.com/program/pmberkeley2009.

* KurzweiiAI.net newsletter readers have been invited to submit comments and questions via [email protected], with name and affiliation optional. The conversation will be posted in print or audio form. -Ed.