Yesterday's Deinard Memorial Lecture on Law & Medicine was a fitting conclusion to a visionary series. Hundreds of attendees heard from a multidisciplinary panel on the fast-moving, emerging field of patient-led medicine. Prof. Jason Bobe (Mount Sinai School of Medicine) kicked things off by examining the obstacles to broad patient engagement in research, and shared his efforts to empower potential research participants through the Personal Genome Project and Open Humans. Ernesto Ramirez of Fitabase discussed the move toward gathering, analyzing and sharing personal data, and how that has both sparked patient-driven collaborations and led to the development of devices such as the "artificial pancreas," for those with Type 1 Diabetes. Prof. Kingshuk K. Sinha (Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota) broadened the conversation to include business perspectives, such as supply-chain management, that can be used to increase access to new health-care products, and also highlighted some potential pitfalls of self-treatment, such as patients using unproven or dangerous approaches. Prof. Barbara Evans (University of Houston Law Center) wrapped up with remarks about the ways laws and regulations meant to protect patients have, in some cases, served as an obstacle to participation in research. An article about the event from the Minneapolis Star Tribune can be read here.