Our ninth annual conference, Precision Medicine Without Borders—organized by HMS professors of biomedical informatics Zak Kohane and Raj Manrai—will focus on emerging topics as well as long-standing challenges at the intersection of precision medicine and global health.

For decades, global health scholars like the heroic Paul Farmer have grappled with and written about the challenges of improving individual and population health across borders, including designing “effector arms” that are aware of the social roots and structural inequities that cause or exacerbate disease.

Precision medicine recasts these familiar global health challenges in the molecular era, forcing us to confront foundational questions about how molecular diagnostics and treatments can be scaled and delivered globally, how biobanks should be designed, what variation is “normal,” and which technologies might help us cross the implementation gap. This conference will provide a platform to discuss these supranational questions about global precision medicine.