RESUMO
Personalized medicine heralds the future of medicine. The 2009 Westlake International Conference on Personalized Medicine held from May 29-31, 2009, in Hangzhou, China (www.westlakeconference.org) brought together approximately 200 participants and over 40 presenters from a dozen countries. The conference was discussed in detail, with focus on the following major areas of personalized medicine: preventative and predictive medicine, cancer systems biology and therapy, physiology and artificial liver systems, nanotechnology and informatics, proteomics and systems pathology, genomics and pharmacogenomics, and epigenetics and new techniques. During the conference, the Asian Association of Systems Biology and Medicine (AASBM) was officially formed, and the ad hoc steering members for each of the major Asian countries were appointed to recruit key players from each country. The IBC (Interdisciplinary Bio Central) journal was suggested as the official journal for the AASBM, as it is a truly open journal (www.ibc7.org). The Web site for AASBM will be aasbm.org.