Partners gets $12.3M to advance genomic medicine
The federal government is giving Partners HealthCare $12.3 million to help resolve one of the largest controversies surrounding genomic medicine — how, and when, to tell patients what unseen future diseases and health conditions are lurking in their DNA.
The funds will be used to analyze genetic data of 25,000 blood samples over four years and deliver that information to patients and physicians through Partners’ new electronic medical record system.
Researchers will collect feedback on the delivery of that information, from its psychological effects on patients to its economic strain on the health care system.
“The health care systems generally are struggling with how to deliver genomic information,” said Dr. Scott Weiss, a principal investigator and scientific director of Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine. “There’s national imperative around this. What we’re doing is a microcosm of what the president proposes.”
Samples will be used from the Partners Biobank — a Cambridge-located repository that houses thousands of blood samples taken from consenting patients.
Researchers will look for genetic variants that could be linked to conditions including hereditary breast cancer and mood disorders.
“Genomics is here today. It’s being used in clinical care, partly for diagnostics, but it’s not being used for preventive medicine in a broad way,” said Heidi Rehm, director of the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine at Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine and one of the study’s principal investigators. “I think that’ll really help us as clinicians and laboratories to determine what information we should be giving to the patient.”
Partners’ Brigham and Women’s Hospital will serve as one of nine sites across the country funded by the National Institutes of Health to be part of the eMERGE network — Electronic Medical Records and Genomics — which studies the best ways to combine gene therapy research and electronic health records.
The Brigham will be one of two sites in the country to coordinate the project’s DNA analysis. Baylor College of Medicine in Houston will serve as the second location.
The project, researchers say, complements President Obama’s $215 million precision medicine initiative, which he announced in February, and would help find ways to treat patients based on their unique genetic quirks.
Partners has invested $1.2 billion in the implementation of electronic medical records system Epic, which the Brigham began using in June, and will launch at Massachusetts General Hospital next spring.