On June 21, Patrick Maxwell, Head of the School of Clinical Medicine of the University of Cambridge, delivered a lecture entitled“How Genomics Is Changing Medicine as part of the Qizhen Global Vision Lecture Series at Zhejiang University.

Patrick Maxwell was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK and was appointed Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge in 2012. Patrick Maxwell has been centrally involved in a series of discoveries that have revealed how changes in oxygenation are sensed, and how genetic alterations cause kidney disease.

In the lecture, Prof. Patrick Maxwell mentioned that “genomics is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of science focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. In 1977, Fred Sanger and his team completed the work concerning the phi X 174 bacteriophage which is a single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) virus and the first DNA-based genome to be sequenced. This bacteriophage has a [+] circular single-stranded DNA genome of 5386 nucleotides encoding 11 proteins. In 2001, the draft of the Human Genome Project was released with the goal of sequencing and identifying all three billion chemical units in the human genetic instruction set. The efficiency of sequencing is staggering, but how to store the massive body of acquired data is much of an issue.

The sequencing of the human genome can be applied to precise diagnosis, in particular of hereditary diseases. Diagnosis will be increasingly crucial to therapy and play a critical role in such supposedly “common” diseases as diabetes. Genomics can also be applied to prenatal screening, cancer testing, treatment formulation, therapeutic monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases as well as understanding and control of the immune reaction, thereby altering people’s insight into diseases and behavior.