From HealthNewsDigest.com
Aurora Health Care Launches Personal Genome Project
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May 10, 2009 - 7:32:00 AM
(HealthNewsDigest.com) - Aurora Health Care, the largest not-for-profit health care provider in eastern Wisconsin, recently launched what could soon become one of the biggest personal genome collections in the world. The Open-Source Robotic Biorepository & Informatics Technology, ORBIT, is intended to help streamline medical discovery by providing scientists with a diverse library of DNA specimens.
One of the ways ORBIT is expected to further science is by helping develop the field of personalized medicine, according to Randall Lambrecht, Ph.D., Aurora’s vice president of research and academic relations.
“The field of pharmacogenomics aims to find a way to determine the most effective drug for an individual with the fewest side effects, based on that person’s genetic makeup,” Lambrecht says. “This is the prelude to ‘personalized medicine,’ where a drug or drug combinations are developed specifically for an individual.”
The current one-drug-fits-all paradigm is like giving everyone the same shoe to wear, everyone doesn’t respond to the same drug in the same way. For example, between 30% and 70% of patients treated for a cardiovascular condition with statin drugs don’t respond, and the reason can often be traced to a genetic variant, Lambrecht says.
Another way ORBIT is hoped to improve medicine is by helping speed the pace of clinical trials. These studies often require thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of specimens, which can take years to find. In three months of operation, ORBIT already has 3,000 individuals represented in its library. By year’s end it is expected to have 75,000 specimens available to researchers. Aurora serves 1.8 million patients a year. When fully operational, 100,000 new specimens are expected to be added annually, and ORBIT soon could top 500,000 specimens.
Another important characteristic of ORBIT is that all researchers who use its specimens will contribute the data their research generates to an open information bank. The expectation is that by giving others access to such data, researchers worldwide will be able to minimize study repetition and build on previous results.
For now, ORBIT is focused on collecting and storing DNA from blood specimens, though tumor tissue or other specimens could be collected in the future.
If patients agree to participate, blood left over from their medical tests is sent to the ORBIT lab. Here a robot extracts DNA from the blood, bar codes the sample, and stores it in a freezer that holds up to 76,800 vials. The bar code allows the informatics technology to link each sample with the donor’s privacy-protected electronic medical record.
ORBIT would give researchers the ability to look at how a patient’s age, gender, race, weight, medical history and genetic markers contribute to a drug’s usefulness, with the ultimate goal of learning how to find the right therapy, at the right place at the right time.
“By evaluating all these factors, ideally it will be possible to create a formula to determine which drug, at what dose, would be right for each patient,” says Matthew Tector, Ph.D., ORBIT’s director. “We hope to improve patient care by supporting health care research with this repository.
Aurora Health Care is a not-for-profit Wisconsin health care provider and a national leader in efforts to improve the quality of health care. Aurora offers care at sites in more than 90 communities throughout eastern Wisconsin.
www.aurora.com
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