WORLD> Middle East
MENA health experts vow to adopt innovative treatment tools
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-10-24 17:27

AMMAN -- Health experts from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) vowed to establish a regional mechanism to implement clinical trials and personalized medication, local daily The Jordan Times reported on Friday.

"We will discuss setting up the infrastructure to push for the use of these tools and develop drug manufacture to conform with the nature of diseases in our region that are different from the United States," King Hussein Institute for Biotechnology and Cancer (KHIBC) Director General Sameer Khleif said at the opening of the regional clinical medicine conference named "Facilitating Clinical Trials."

A clinical trial is a research conducted on volunteers who are asked specific health questions. Carefully conducted clinical trials are the safest and fastest way to find treatments that work, according to experts.

Personalized medicine uses information about a person's genetic makeup to tailor products which will detect, treat or prevent disease in that person, added experts.

The goal is to get the best medical outcomes by choosing treatments that work well with a person's genetic profile, or with certain characteristics in the person's blood or cells.

The two-day conference, which concludes on Friday, is organized by KHIBC, the International Pharmaceutical Research Center and the US Department of Health and Human Services.