Lunch @UCSF with Elena Flowers – Precision-medicine predictors of health
Lunch @UCSF with Elena Flowers – Precision-medicine predictors of health
DOWNLOADABLE GUIDE TO SUNDAY EVENTSBefore she became a nurse, Elena Flowers was a research assistant at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where she worked on a study that examined how individual responses to common drugs for cardiovascular risk factors differed between African-Americans and Caucasians. She saw up close the disproportionate burden that chronic conditions, like cardiovascular and metabolic disease, can have on vulnerable populations.
These experiences eventually led her to the field of epigenetics, which examines how environmental factors can change how a gene functions or is expressed. Those changes, it’s believed, can predict and possibly influence both how disease develops in individuals and how they respond to therapy. Flowers is determined to deepen our understanding in this area, in the hope that it can speed the development of more personalized and effective healthcare.
At this lunch, Flowers will share how she applies precision-medicine approaches to predict and understand the risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Specifically, she’ll discuss the utility of epigenetic biomarkers for detecting risk and to predict how patients will respond to interventions aimed at reducing risk, including current studies of microRNA expression in insulin-resistant individuals, and predicting how these individuals will respond to both pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions.
Registration is required.
