The very first Munich Biomarker Conference at the end of november in the City Hilton attracted about 200 experts from regional enterprises and scientific institutions as well as global players like Roche and Sanofi.
For the newly established movement to "personalized medicine" within the Munich Biotech Cluster m4 the conference was set up to showcase the "local heroes" and discuss "global challenges".
Both was done excellently by scientists from the university hospitals and scientific institutes from Max-Planck and Helmholtz showing new methods in describing patient subpopulations in different cancer entities, in cardiovascular diseases and in CNS-illness like Alzheimer and depression. In fact the paradigme shift in "how to stratify the patients" was very well adressed scientifically but also from the bioinformatic side: For example Genomatix showed how the analysis of "gene cluster" in patient subgroups and different indications could overcome the bottle neck of getting to much gene-data of single mutated genes telling nothing of relevance to the patient outcome and clinical practise.
Slides of the presentations and an abstract booklet can be found on the Munich "personalized medicince" webpage:
