Personalized medicine: Your genes, your medical futur
SAMUEL LUNENFELD RESEARCH INSTITUTE Genetic information helps clinicians recommend the best treatment at the right dose.
Experts at Mount Sinai Hospital are using genetic information for earlier diagnoses and customized therapies.
Personalized medicine is aimed at customizing an individual’s health care based on an understanding of their genetic makeup. Doctors have long recognized significant differences in the way in which individuals express a specific disease or respond to one particular medication.
New knowledge of the genes that cause disease and influence individual responses to an illness allows physicians to make more informed health decisions, intervene earlier in the course of a patient’s illness, and tailor therapy to a person’s individual genetic “signature.”
Mount Sinai Hospital has launched a personalized health initiative aimed at translating the wealth of new genetic information to improved health-care delivery. According to Dr. Kathy Siminovitch, the director of this initiative, “the goal is to bring new capabilities in DNA sequencing and informatics technologies to the clinic to ‘personalize’ patient care and achieve better health outcomes.”
Inside the womb, the earliest stages of development impact our lifelong health.
Close to 7,000 babies are born at Mount Sinai Hospital every year. A personalized approach will help ensure that timely interventions are in place to promote healthy deliveries and ensure the best possible starts for our tiniest patients.
Lunenfeld scientists Drs. Stephen Lye, Alan Bocking, Lyle Palmer and colleagues are championing one of the largest research cohort studies in North America designed to help foster healthy deliveries and improve the care of Canadian women and their children. Called the Ontario
Birth Study, this groundbreaking effort – in collaboration with the Ontario Health Study – will launch this spring, recruiting all pregnant women admitted to the hospital for prenatal care, and will follow the health of mothers and children over the course of their lifetime.
“We believe there is huge potential here for long-term prevention of common diseases,” says Dr. Lye. “The environment in the womb and in early life affects which of our genes are turned on and off. If we can optimize early development, we have a better chance of preventing common adult diseases and promoting long-term health.”
More than 10,000 women and children are expected to participate in this innovative and prestigious clinical study over the next four years.
Not just a “one size fits all” approach to treat the millions of Canadians with arthritis.
Mount Sinai’s researchers and clinicians are using genetic information to uncover the causes and best course of therapy in people with rheumatoid arthritis, a debilitating autoimmune condition. These insights can help alleviate and even reverse the severity of a person’s symptoms.
Dr. Kathy Siminovitch and her colleagues in the Rebecca Macdonald Centre for Arthritis and Autoimmune Diseases are creating and analyzing large databases of patients’ genetic and clinical information to identify genes that increase risk, and influence the course and outcomes of arthritis.
Alicia Cushing, a 65-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis, became more mobile and had less swelling, pain and fatigue after she was treated with a particular biologic medication by Mount Sinai clinician Dr. Edward Keystone last summer. “Now I do a lot of walking and go ice skating – before it was hard for me to even move,” says Cushing, who had previously tried other medications that didn’t relieve her symptoms.
Drs. Siminovitch and Keystone and their team are working to develop a method that will help patients like Cushing get the right treatment sooner. “There are nine biologics approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis and we see the benefit Alicia is getting from the right medication. Promising biomarkers are now being developed that will help us predict how a patient will respond to a specific medication and put the patient on the right one immediately,” says Dr. Keystone.