Personalized Medicine is revolutionizing the medical world. Understanding and integrating genetic and molecular information with traditional clinical knowledge is the hallmark of this transformation. However, the treatment of complex diseases is much more challenging as the human genome is just one out of an array of factors that influence the dynamics of the disease. At present much of the medical practice is based on standards of care derived from the epidemiologic studies of large cohorts that do not take into account the individual's genetic, proteomic, and metabolic characteristics. Furthermore, in spite of efforts to develop data-driven, expert–based, clinical decision support systems, there are no clear and simple means to disseminate new findings into clinical practice. The main focus of the Up Close and Personalized Congress is to examine the essential clinical, genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, pharmacogenomic and biomarker data necessary to predict, prevent and treat major medical conditions concerning metabolism (diabetes and obesity), cardiovascular complications and cancer. In addressing the need and challenge for narrowing the gap between knowledge and clinical practice, one of the key themes will be to explore bio-informatic tools, algorithms, artificial intelligence techniques, decision support systems and other new platforms for predicting clinical outcome and better tailoring treatment modeling to the individual patient. Furthermore, as the patient is at the center of our concern we will also discuss modalities to “empower” the patient.