Public Health Genomics Journal: Adjusting the Agenda to Future Needs

promising applications in human health management during the whole life-course. In fact, what was little time ago a vision for a new era of public health, in which advances from the -omic sciences would be integrated into strategies aiming at benefiting population health, is now responding to the very pressing need for the development of effective personalized healthcare going even beyond personalized medicine. While the utility of most genetic tests and biomarkers is still not evidence-based, the real take-home message stops here and is a different one. In the personalized medicine setting, the traditional assessment and evaluation tools just do not work anymore. Public health genomics (PHG) in the future will be quite different from PHG in the past! The highly technology and computational sciencesdriven dynamics of genomics as a ‘moving target’, starting from the Human Genome Project to the Personal Genome Project, is currently changing public health research, policies and practice in a substantial way. Rapid scientific advances and tools in genomics, such as in the light of epigenomics, microbiomics and systems biology, not only contribute to the understanding of disease mechanisms and to the characterization of each person’s unique clinical, genomic and environmental information, but also provide the option of new, Published online: May 17, 2011