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Conclusions and Future Perspectives 169

Also, the Golden Helix Foundation organizes satellite events to Golden Helix
conferences, specifically aimed at the general public, that deal with issues
pertaining to genetics,. Such an event was organized during the 2016 Golden
Helix Summer School on September 24, 2016, with a theme evolving around
cancer genetics.

Finally, the Golden Helix Foundation, as part of its active involvement in the
U-PGx project, plans to organize two major events aimed at increasing the aware-
ness of patients and the general public about the U-PGx project and the useful-
ness of genome-guided stratification and rationalization of medical treatment
modalities. In particular, two major events for patients and the general public
will be organized in London (December 2017) and Rome (December 2018)
in close cooperation with patients’ organizations and advocacy groups so that
attendance to these conferences as well as their impact to society is maximized.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

In the previous paragraphs, we have summarized the overall educational
and outreaching activities of the Golden Helix Foundation, aiming to enrich
genomics education among health care professionals and biomedical scientists
and at the same time increase genomic literacy among patients and the gen-
eral public. As already highlighted, the most important feature of the Golden
Helix conferences is to ensure that all recent knowledge and developments in
the field of genomic and precision medicine are brought to participants from
developing countries, who often face financial and logistic constrains to attend
similar conference in the United States and Western Europe. At the same time,
knowledge and developments in the field are communicated to the delegates
by internationally renowned speakers from research centers of excellence.
Since November 2008, when the first Golden Helix Symposium was organized
in Athens, Greece, there have been 35 Golden Helix conferences that have been
organized in 29 major cities in 19 different countries in Europe, the Americas,
the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, having attracted more than 6000 par-
ticipants from more than 100 countries from all five continents. Participants
have ranged from students to senior academics and researchers, while several
participants have registered to attend recurrent events, indicative of the impact
of these scientific events.

Also, on several occasions, and through the partnership with the Genomic
Medicine Alliance (Patrinos and Brand, 2014), abstracts from major Golden
Helix conferences are published as freely available, as well as PubMed-cited
full-text supplements of the international peer-reviewed scientific journal Public
Health Genomics (Anonymous, 2015, 2016), hence offering Golden Helix confer-
ence participants an international forum to maximize exposure of their findings.