DC could be personalized medicine global capital: Inova CEO

Medical treatment has traditionally been based around the idea that every patient is, fundamentally, the same. With the advent of genome sequencing, a new type of medical industry has come to fruition: personalized medicine for specific people.

Todd Stottlemyer, CEO of the Inova Center for Personalized Health, said the greater Washington region has what takes as the place for this field to flourish.

More than anywhere else, D.C. entrepreneurs are “purpose driven,” Stottlemyer said. They care deeply about causes, and they’re pursuing them through business.

However, D.C. still has improvements to make.

“Sometimes we don’t tell our story as best we could. I think we have a great story to tell, but sometimes we might be a little bit too modest,” Stottlemyer said about the talent in the Washington area.

“For us, personalized health is really about how you keep healthy people healthy in the first place,” Stottlemyer said. He said his industry takes into account genetic information and predispositions to understand exactly what patients need.

Sequencing of the human genome in the past few years has made advances possible. “You couldn’t fundamentally do that without technology. Increases in high-performance computing, storage, software, data analytics, looking for patterns,” he told What’s Working in Washington.

“Now we can actually understand the specific disease you have — the molecular characterization of that disease. So there may be 40 or 50 different types of lung cancer, you have a specific type of lung cancer, we want to treat that specific lung cancer,” said Stottlemyer.

“We’re able today, with genomics and genetic markers, to understand very specifically the molecular characterization of a person’s specific disease.”

Proximity to the federal government makes D.C. a desirable place for personalized medicine to grow as an industry. “You have big federal agencies that focus on health, and obviously fund significant research in this area,” Stottlemyer said, adding that the area’s universities are also a strong source for this research.

Inova recently took over the former Exxon-Mobil campus in Northern Virginia. ICPH hopes to jumpstart its work in the D.C. area at the four-building, 1.2-million-square-foot property.

“It’s an exciting piece of property for us,” Stottlemyer said. ICPH has plans to open multiple facilities dedicated to research and technology as well as a cancer institute and a clinic over the next 15 months, attracting strong employees from around the world.

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