EP 147: From research to delivering precision medicine in the clinic with Scott Weiss, Professor of Medicine at Harvard University

This week, we’re joined by Scott Weiss, the Professor of Medicine at Harvard University, Associate Director of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and former Scientific Director at Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine at Mass General Brigham. Patrick and Scott discuss the challenges of integrating large-scale, longitudinal multi-omic profiling into healthcare settings, demonstrating the value of preventative initiatives to health insurance providers, and why, at 78, Scott isn’t planning on retiring from genetics anytime soon.

0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast

01:00 Welcome to Scott

01:55 Scott’s career highlights to date, ranging from epidemiology to the genetics of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

04:56 How and why Scott decided to transition into genetics

06:30 The advances in our understanding of the genetics of asthma and COPD over the past 20 years

10:00 What Scott has learned about translating genomics discoveries into clinical practice and some of the biggest challenges for implementation

13:23 Tackling the reimbursement system in US healthcare and proving the value of preventive, genomics-based care

18:19 Driving down the cost of genomics initiatives such as newborn sequencing to provide high-value impact to patients

19:45 The long-term journey of taking large-scale, longitudinal multi-omic profiling from a research context into healthcare systems

24:10 Creating health-system-associated biobanks at an effective scale and what’s required to achieve that

29:42 Where Scott believes reimbursed predictive omics will first be applied

32:10 Emerging fields in research and personalized medicine that will be key areas of development and discovery in the coming years

36:53 Large-scale prospective biobanks versus a federated approach which piggybacks on existing data collection

39:45 Scott’s current research focus

42:40 What Scott likes to do in his free time outside of academia

43:41 Closing remarks