I am very happy to inform you of my decision to be the first to volunteer and donate a sample of my DNA to the Coriell Institute in Camden, NJ. A Congressional briefing was held in Washington yesterday, Tuesday, December 4, 2007 on this “personalized medicine project.”
Researchers have found that certain genetic traits can show people are more at risk for certain diseases than others. These diseases include cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure. Currently, doctors do not have access to this information to use in planning a patient’s treatment. With the 10,000 samples of DNA that was given to the research group yesterday, scientists at Coriell will analyze them over the next three years. In this study, the Institute hopes to identify who is vulnerable to side effects of medicine and who is not in order to avoid having major drugs being pulled off the shelf completely such as the pain reliever Vioxx.
The Coriell Institute will be studying certain sections of patient’s genomes and working with doctors at participating hospitals in South Jersey and Philadelphia to set up a computer access system. This system would provide doctors information they would need to know for only the time they spend with a patient.
This sort of study will help, for example, women who show a higher risk of getting breast cancer be advised to get mammograms earlier in life.
The Bergen Record:
Personalized medicine on the horizon
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
By HERB JACKSON
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
A South Jersey congressman donated his DNA on Tuesday for a study that scientists say could mark the beginning of the end of "one size fits all" medicine.
Rep. Rob Andrews, D-Haddon Heights, said at a news conference in the Capitol that he agreed to be the first volunteer in a "personalized medicine project" run by Camden's Coriell Institute because he wants to know if his daughters face a genetic risk of dying the way his mother and her sisters did.
"I'm not sure there's not some genetic switch that makes people in my family have massive, dramatic lung failure later in life," Andrews said. "I sure don't want it to happen to my daughters."
Scientists at Coriell will analyze Andrews' DNA and that of about 10,000 other volunteers over the next three years in a $5 million study.
"We're trying to build a bridge here from science to medicine," Coriell CEO Michael F. Christman said at the news conference.
While researchers have found that certain genetic markers show people are more at risk for certain diseases such as cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure, Christman said there's no practical way for family doctors to get that information and use it in planning a patient's treatment.
He said advising a patient with a higher risk of diabetes to have occasional glucose screenings, for example, could prevent having the disease go undiagnosed until it damages organs.
He said the earliest applications of personalized medicine will likely come in dealing with cancer. Women who show a higher risk of getting breast cancer, for example, could be advised to get mammograms earlier in life.
Personalized medicine is controversial when it comes to pharmaceuticals, since tests could show that some widely prescribed medications are not effective at all on some patients, essentially reducing the size of a drug company's potential market.
But Christman said it could also identify who is vulnerable to side effects and who is not and that could make drugs pulled from the market because of a handful of serious problems, such as the pain reliever Vioxx, available again.
"The 99 percent of people who benefited from Vioxx couldn't take it anymore," Christman said.
That's in the future, however.
For now, Coriell will be mapping key sections of patients' genomes and working with their doctors at participating hospitals in South Jersey and Philadelphia to set up a computer access system. The goal is to provide only the information a doctor would need to know in the time he spends with a patient, which on average is about 12 minutes.
Under a state privacy law that Christman said is the toughest in the nation, the patient would control who could access his personal information, but scientists would be able to access anonymous records of the genetic patterns of the patients in the study.
The patients, however, would not learn everything the scientists learn. Christman said researchers would not tell someone they have an elevated risk of contracting Alzheimer's disease, for example, because there's no effective therapy to reduce the chances of getting it. Providing that information to the patient could produce only unneeded anxiety.
For that reason, Christman said he was not sure if Andrews would get the answer he's seeking from the study.
"It would depend whether there's effective medical intervention available or not," he said.
The study has private funding to study 10,000 patients, but Coriell would like to expand it to cover as many as 100,000. Christman said he got a positive reception to a pitch for federal funding at the Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday.
E-mail: jackson@northjersey.com
