EP 147: From research to delivering precision medicine in the clinic with Scott Weiss, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University

The Genetics Podcast

0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast

01:00 Welcome to Scott

01:55 Scott’s career highlights to date, ranging from epidemiology to the genetics of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

04:56 How and why Scott decided to transition into genetics

06:30 The advances in our understanding of the genetics of asthma and COPD over the past 20 years

10:00 What Scott has learned about translating genomics discoveries into clinical practice and some of the biggest challenges for implementation

13:23 Tackling the reimbursement system in US healthcare and proving the value of preventive, genomics-based care

18:19 Driving down the cost of genomics initiatives such as newborn sequencing to provide high-value impact to patients

19:45 The long-term journey of taking large-scale, longitudinal multi-omic profiling from a research context into healthcare systems

24:10 Creating health-system-associated biobanks at an effective scale and what’s required to achieve that

29:42 Where Scott believes reimbursed predictive omics will first be applied

32:10 Emerging fields in research and personalized medicine that will be key areas of development and discovery in the coming years

36:53 Large-scale prospective biobanks versus a federated approach which piggybacks on existing data collection

39:45 Scott’s current research focus

42:40 What Scott likes to do in his free time outside of academia

43:41 Closing remarks