Genomic Medicine in Cardiovascular Fellowship Training.

Abstract

As genomic testing becomes more accessible for both clinical indications and patients’ personal curiosity, cardiologists are increasingly asked to interpret the results in terms of future risk of disease. In many cases, patients hope that such testing will yield detailed, personalized recommendations regarding their own medical care as well as their family’s. However, given the lack of formal instruction in genomic analysis during cardiovascular training, a gap exists between some patients’ desires and our own abilities to incorporate genomic information into practice. Patient care and biomedical research will undoubtedly be increasingly influenced by genomic medicine efforts in the coming years. In his 2016 budget proposal, President Obama allocated $215 million to fund the Precision Medicine Initiative.1 The goal of this program is to develop data lakes compiling vast arrays of patient data, including genomic information and detailed phenotypic, epigenomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic data. By using the computational power of such an effort, clinicians will hopefully be able to better predict disease and tailor therapies at the population and individual levels. Given the enormous resource investment and global burden of cardiovascular disease, the cardiovascular community will likely play a key role in this movement. Therefore, it is critical that we begin to incorporate training modules on genomic …