The first Up Close and Personalized, International Congress on Personalized Medicine took place on February 2-5, 2012 in Florence, Italy.

The main focus of the Up Close and Personalized Congress is to examine the essential clinical, genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, pharmacogenomic and biomarker data necessary to predict, prevent and treat major medical conditions concerning metabolism (diabetes and obesity), cardiovascular complications and cancer. In addressing the need and challenge for narrowing the gap between knowledge and clinical practice, one of the key themes will be to explore bio-informatic tools, algorithms, artificial intelligence techniques, decision support systems and other new platforms for predicting clinical outcome and better tailoring treatment modeling to the individual patient. Furthermore, as the patient is at the center of our concern we will also discuss modalities to “empower” the patient.