Cedars-Sinai Receives $1.2 Million

Cedars-Sinai www.cedars-sinai-edu health investigators with grant funding for $1.2 million available from the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine www.ciapm.org will use the funds to expand the capabilities of precision medicine within the state. The funds will support six demonstration projects using remote monitoring to predict heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.

The research team will look for the earliest signs of cardiovascular disease by monitoring patients remotely using a specialized watch that can measure activity, sleep, heart rate, and stress level. In addition, patients will send researchers finger-prick blood samples by mail, enabling doctors to assess a variety of biomarkers and measure more than 500 blood proteins.

By combining the data and integrating the data into the patients’ medical records, the researchers will be able to predict which patients may have a heart attack or stroke. The team will also measure the cost-effectiveness of this approach and whether it could be covered by insurance companies and other payers.

“The precision medicine initiative creates an amazing opportunity to confront this leading health threat by leveraging team science and advanced data analytics in ways never before possible,” according to Brennan M. Spiegel, MD, Director of Cedars-Sinai Health Services Research.

Also, Cedars-Sinai’s Precision Health www.cedars-sinai.edu/Precision-Health program is harnessing advanced data on individuals’ specific genes, proteins, microbiome, and other body chemistry. The goal is to tailor therapies and medications for specific patients.

The Cedars-Sinai team working on the project includes researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA http://medschool.ucls.edu. The team will partner with five California life science companies including HealthLoop http://healthloop.com, Neoteryx www.neoteryx.com, Beckman Coulter www.beckmancoulter.com, SCIEX https://sciex.com, and Thermo Fisher Scientific www.thermofisher.com.