A key researcher in the discovery of dysfunctional gene variants “MEF2A” and “FLAP,” he helped identify them as markedly increasing a person’s risk of heart attack. While chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, his cardiovascular program was for 12 years ranked by U.S. News & World Report as number one in the nation in patient care and research.

Now, as chief academic officer and chief of genomic medicine and translational science for Scripps Health, he finds himself on the cutting edge of a promising new age.

“We are about to enter a new era of medicine – in which every aspect will eventually be individualized, including prevention and therapy,” says Dr. Topol. “Genetic associations have had a major impact on the treatment of cancer. Now we’re looking at genetics as a way to better treat heart disease and other medical conditions.”

The Scripps Genomic Medicine program and Translational Science Institute are bringing physicians and research scientists together to discover and define the genes that may influence disease. The goal is to determine how one person’s genome may make them more susceptible than another to a given disease – then to take what is learned into clinical research, drug discovery programs and individualized patient care trials.

Dr. Topol has been the principal investigator on more than 15 international, multi-center research trials involving 40 countries and more than 190,000 patients. In the process, he has helped pioneer critical heart care therapies now used in daily practice – therapies such as clot busters, anti-platelet agents and angioplasty devices. The direct connection between research and patient care is no accident. Dr. Topol is a physician-scientist who, as a senior consultant in the Division of Cardiology at Scripps Clinic, continues to see patients despite his research focus. He believes research is only as good as what it can do to help others and that today’s approach is too broad.

“Most medications that are developed for diseases today truly help only a very small percentage of the people who take them,” says Dr. Topol. “It’s not that they’re bad medications. It’s just that every person is unique and medications are developed for extremely broad populations.

“The future will be different,” he adds. “With new knowledge, we’ll eventually be able to tailor medications to a person’s specific genomic makeup, and we’ll know whether a person can be helped by a certain medication or not. This is what we’re working on at Scripps and I’ve never been more excited.”