A multidisciplinary collaboration is recommended to facilitate the use of CYP2C19 genotype–guided antiplatelet therapy in patients with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Evolving clopidogrel pharmacogenetic evidence necessitates thoughtful iteration of implementation efforts and strategies to optimize long-term maintenance and sustainability. Read the Americal Journal of Health-System Pharmacy journal article here: https://academic.oup.com/ajhp/article/81/12/555/7585304
This summer marks the third graduating class of the Personalized and Genomic Medicine Graduate Certificate Program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the largest yet with 19 students, nearly double the two previous classes.
“Clinicians who receive this training can personalize their care to individual patients in a way that many have not been trained to do,” says Elizabeth Kudron, MD, MPH, FAAP, assistant professor of biomedical informatics and co-director of the program.
With this training, physicians may be able to order and interpret genetic tests, which can be especially helpful in environments where access to a genetics specialist is limited.
Latest class of the Personalized and Genomic Medicine Grad Certificate Program
The Center for Personalized Medicine has around 230,000 patients in its biobank, and it recently crossed the 50,000 mark for patients receiving clinically relevant genetic results.
“Everybody always says, ‘This is so cool, it’s the future of medicine,’” said Dr. Christina Aquilante, the director of pharmacogenomics at the Center for Personalized Medicine. “It’s not the future. It’s the now. It’s happening.”
The Center for Personalized Medicine is a collaboration between the University of Colorado School of Medicine, UCHealth and Children’s Hospital Colorado. It was formed in 2014 and began enrolling patients into the biobank the following year.
The hope is that the collaboration can serve a number of purposes, from improving patient care to also providing new data for research on the links between genetic variation and health conditions. In addition to the work identifying gene-drug interactions, results uploaded to the biobank can also help spot if a patient has a rare gene-driven condition before it’s too late.
Blood test patients can consent to Biobank. The Biobank is a partnership between UCHealth and the University of Colorado at Anschutz Medical Campus.
Crooks emphasized that although the Biobank‘s data is used for research, it is a federally-accredited clinical genetic testing laboratory that returns crucial genetic results to participants who have consented to have their DNA studied.
Pharmacogenomics is advancing quickly: we can warn prescribers in the EHR when patients have genomic variants that reduce medication effectiveness. We are going from screening populations (18,000 so far), to anticipatory screening for high risk patients (cancer center patients about to choose a chemotherapy).
Fueling AI in health care: a center for AI innovation
Progress in all of these areas is being made on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and at UCHealth. The Aurora campus is home to the Center for Health AI and the CU Department of Biomedical Informatics, both committed to harnessing the power of medical data in the service of driving innovation to improve patient care.
Pharmacists at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences are leading the charge in the field of pharmacogenomics with their knowledge of how genetics influence how drugs work in the body.
In Colorado, The Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, a partnership between UCHealth and University of Colorado – Anschutz Medical Campus, has developed a Biobank of patients’ DNA and blood samples. This initiative has, so far, identified 60 patients who have genes identified with higher risks of diseases such as breast and other cancers, and heart failure.
Efforts are now needed to increase the diversity of current genetic libraries. This will help us understand why many diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, affect racial and ethnic groups in different ways —in return, improving the accuracy of personalized medicine for all.
Integrating Biobank data with electronic health record yields personalized pharmacogenetic insights that can spare patients pain – and perhaps save their lives.
The Biobank that returns Clinical Results...
The success of December 1st’s go-live was a culmination of years of hard work from many different teams. In 2015, CCPM partnered with UCHealth to establish the Biobank Research Study. As part of the study, UCHealth patients are asked to provide a blood or saliva sample for genetic research. There is also the potential to have clinically actionable results (e.g., PGx) returned to them and their EHR. Prior to 2021, PGx results had been returned for some Biobank participants but the return process was put on hold to upgrade some of the IT infrastructure. After an incredible team effort, the revised IT pipeline launched on December 1, 2021 and almost 4000 Biobank participants have now had CYP2C19 and SLCO1B1 results returned to their UCHealth EHR and patient portal.
We can’t do what we do without you…. and thousands of others.
To find links and trends in its genetic data, the biobank needs a large pool of genetic samples and medical records.