Students in the Ohio Northern University Raabe College of Pharmacy have formed a student chapter of the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC). More than 100 students comprise the newly formed group.

The purpose of this ONU student PMC chapter is to foster the development and awareness of personalized medicine both educationally and professionally. The organization consists of six sections based on the PMC document “The Case for Personalized Medicine”: technology, regulatory policy, payment, health information technology, genetic non-discrimination and medical education.

Each section is responsible for “scanning” the literature and news to update the entire membership at each monthly meeting. The monthly meetings will consist of section summaries and a presentation by an invited speaker. The first meeting was held this May and featured attorney Kevin Hill, who discussed the legal ramifications of personalized medicine. Additionally, the student chapter’s outreach project for the 2012-13 academic year will be the development and dissemination of an education program for the public. Additionally, the education program will be adapted for presentation in high school biology courses so as to introduce personalized medicine to high school students.

 The Raabe College of Pharmacy was the first college of pharmacy in the country to join the PMC, an interdisciplinary organization leading the way in the implementation of personalized medicine in the U.S. Launched in 2004 to educate the public and policymakers and to promote new ways of thinking about health care, PMC represents a broad spectrum of more than 200 academic, industry, patient, provider and payer communities. According to PMC, “High on the list of breakthroughs expected to transform medicine is personalized medicine – the use of new methods of molecular analysis to better manage a patient’s disease or predisposition to disease. Personalized medicine is likely to change the way drugs are developed and medicine is prescribed.”