The Laboratory for Personalized Medicine (LPM) is part of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI) at Harvard Medical School and was established, in 2008, by Peter Tonellato. The goal of the LPM is to focus on personalized medicine by creating preventative health care for individuals based on their specific medical, family, and genetic characteristics. This challenging task involves identifying and testing solutions to the pragmatic hurdles of integrating new molecular devices, genetic and proteomic data, and disease-focused knowledge to point-of-care practice. Success depends on our ability to implement systems that insure data integrity, can be easily updated, and are minimally disruptive to the current health care workflow.

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we developed the concept of clinical avatars, literally virtual patients, to circumvent the complexity encountered in clinical trials. Millions of avatars are simulated based on mathematical models and genetic variants to test the accuracy, efficiency, and outcome of genetic tests in the clinical enterprise.

Earlier this year, the LPM initiated a seminar to explore the value of scientific cloud computing (lpm.hms.harvard.edu/palaver). The seminar includes over 50 participants ranging from Massachusetts to Wisconsin to Japan. Projects include next generation sequencing alignment algorithm comparisons, clinical avatars, creation of a personalized encyclopedia of genomic variant information (Clinicalpedia), and multiple gene-disease networks.