Expectations are growing for medical care in the post-genome era. It is no exaggeration to say that the functions of reportedly 30,000 to 40,000 genes and their relationships with diseases have only recently began to be elucidated. It is interesting how advances in human genetic research are being applied to the field of clinical laboratory science. This symposium addressed the topics of the diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid tumors, malignancy grading and prognosis prediction in digestive tract cancers, relationships between genetic polymorphisms of drug-metabolizing enzymes and effects and side-effects of anticancer drugs, methods of detecting and identifying pathogenic microorganisms, and genes for the pathogenicity and drug-resistance of microorganisms.

*1Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine, Tokyo Women's Medical University, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8666