Cleveland Clinic geneticist Dr. Charis Eng is one of 65 new members elected to the Institutes of Medicine, a prestigious advisory group that serves as the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
Election to the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, and recognizes people for outstanding professional achievement, according to a statement from the IOM.
Eng joins molecular genetics researcher George Stark, the only other Cleveland Clinic representative elected to the IOM. Eng is the founding director of Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute, and has published 320 original papers in medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Last year, Eng was appointed to a Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee on genetics.
The IOM was established in 1970 and designed to be a national resource for independent, scientifically informed analysis and recommendations on health issues. With the new elections, IOM’s membership stands at 1,817.
