NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute awarded the first set of grants to fund Genomic Medicine Pilot Demonstration Projects (GMPDP). The first four grants went to Duke University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, University of Florida, and to the University of Pennsylvania. The four year grants total more than $2.6 million for the first year and if funding remains available, approximately $12.8 million will be available overall.
One of the grantees, Geoffrey Ginsburg, M.D, PhD Director of Genomic Medicine at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and Executive Director of the Center for Personalized and Precision Medicine, plans to use the family histories that patients provide electronically to help patients and healthcare professionals understand disease risk. This study will encompass healthcare settings to include academic, rural, underserved, and community and family medicine clinics in six states.
The research team will test how to best implement a user-friendly system where patients will provide family health histories specifically for heart disease, thrombosis, and certain cancers. After the information is collected, the system will transmit the information to a decision-making program and provide a report to the patient and physician. The report will provide recommendations for further testing, counseling, and prevention measures.
At Mount Sinai, Dr. Bottinger, MD, Director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine and Carol Horowitz MD, Associate Professor of Health Evidence and Policy, are going to conduct a clinical trial to study the effects of using genomic risk information in the care of African-American patients who have high blood pressure and at risk for developing chronic kidney disease.
According to Dr. Julie Johnson, Pharm D, Director of the University of Florida (UF) Health Personalized Medicine Program, “A better understanding of how a person’s genetic makeup affects drug response will continue to fuel a more personalized approach to medicine, but today, many clinical practices do not readily use this information in caring for patients.”
Last year, UF implemented a personalized medicine program that included pharmacogenetic testing, and now the researchers want to expand the program within and beyond UF Health. Dr. Johnson and her team plan to implement the personalized medicine genotyping program involving pharmacogenomics testing and decision support in a large private health system in Orlando and engage smaller community centers affiliated with Florida State University’s College of Medicine.
The final grant award component will be to establish a coordinating center at the University of Pennsylvania. “The coordinating center will make sure that the various project groups collaborate, share data and insights, and come up with broad generalizable results to be used in a wider application of clinical genomics”, reports Stephen Kimmel MD, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.