Eminent speakers share insights at Sidra Medicine conference

Eminent speakers share insights at Sidra Medicine conference

The second day of Sidra Medicine’s Precison Medicine and Functional Genomics (PMFG) conference focused on precision care in maternal and child health and advances in innovative therapies.

Comprising two tracks running concurrently, Day 2 of the flagship research conference saw keynote speakers such as Dr Anna David, University College London, UK; discuss 'Precision Medicine in Utero', while Dr Michael Snyder, Stanford University, US, offered insights into 'Big Data and Health'.

Local speakers included Dr Nady El Hajj, Hamad Bin Khalifa University; Dr Johnny Awwad, Sidra Medicine; and Dr Albert Adu Opoka, Hamad Medical Corporation.

The organising chair of Track 3, Dr Souhaila al-Khodor, director, Maternal and Child Health Programme and associate level principal investigator, Microbiome and Host-Microbes Interactions Laboratory at Sidra Medicine, said: “We learned a lot from our international and local speakers, and a key message was that to improve outcomes of fertility, it is important to understand pre-implantation genetics, and that precision medicine starts as early as in-utero. During a session presented by Prof Rachel Tribe and Prof Ramkumar Menon, we appreciated the need for clinically useful biomarkers that can be used to predict pre-term birth and how using extracellular vesicles to deliver anti-inflammatory drugs could reduce the risk