Personalized medicine study targets drug safety
By Bill Snyder
October 16, 2009
Can genetic information embedded in patients' electronic medical records help improve treatment outcomes and avoid adverse drug effects?
That's the question researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center will try to answer thanks to a two-year, $6.4 million “Grand Opportunities” stimulus grant they received last month from the National Institutes of Health.
“If we hit a home run, it could actually change care,” said Dan Masys, M.D., chair of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt.
“If we are able to find a set of genetic variants that reliably predict whether you would get an adverse effect of a medicine,” Masys said, “… then we might imagine doing a panel of genotyping on every single person who comes through the door.”
Masys is leading the study with Dan Roden, M.D., director of the Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics. Roden, who also is assistant vice chancellor for Personalized Medicine, predicted that the study will help identify genetic variations “that we think really ought to be in people's charts.”
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