Personalized medicine took center stage at a mini-retreat of the Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science.
As plans by Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor, Maine, to build an institute for personalized medicine on the UConn Health Center campus move forward, dozens of Connecticut researchers gathered for a two-day series of talks and meetings at the Cell and Genome Sciences Building for what Dr. Cato T. Laurencin, CICATS CEO, called an opportunity to “understand where we are and where we want to go.”
Marc Lalande, professor and chairman of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology, says the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine will have “potentially a major impact” on CICATS, in research and beyond.
“On education, we could probably train students in this community who will be on the forefront of genomic medicine,” says Lalande, who chairs the CICATS Scientific Advisory Board. “And all the health care providers in the region, we could have an imprimatur that the Hartford region is the place to come for certain diseases around genomic medicine.”
UConn established CICATS as an alliance of regional hospitals and community health care organizations in 2009. In that spirit of partnership, Dr. Gualberto Ruaño, director of Hartford Hospital’s Genetic Research Center, was invited as the keynote speaker.
“Connecticut is wired for personalized medicine,” Ruaño says. “There’s a network now for 200 community-based clinicians using personalized medicine. We have the connectivity, with a web-based portal, and we’ve moved this technology to real-time.”
Ruaño says the mental health community has adopted real-time personalized medicine as a standard of care, and that Hartford’s GRC has helped nearly 3,000 patients throughout the state in the last three years. It uses mental health as a model, and it centers on medication.
“We know that DNA is the foundation of life,” Ruaño says. “DNA also can be used for decision support in the clinic, in terms of selection and dosing of medication. It’s almost like how a GPS helps you with routing. There are 80 brands of mental health medications. Personalized medicine helps us match the drug’s needs with what the patient has. With it we analyze which roads to avoid and which roads to take.”
Lalande says Connecticut’s investment in bioscience is what drew Jackson Laboratory, and it comes on the verge of what could be a revolution in medicine.
“In its simplest form, there’s what’s called pharmacogenetics, and it’s essentially that if you look at a population and you give them a drug, all these different people are going to respond optimally to a different dose,” Lalande says. “And a good part of that response could be a genetic predisposition.”
CTSA Update
UConn will apply again this year for a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health, a major grant once seen as critical to the future of research at the University, and part of the basis for the establishment of CICATS. Laurencin says the focus of CICATS has widened.
“The CTSA grant is still very important, but it’s also important for us to build CICATS to provide value and resources for the entire region,” Laurencin says. “The ability to have productive grants in the future depends on the bioinformatics and biostatistics that CICATS provides.”
And Laurencin is quick to point out a bigger picture.
“Institutions like Hartford Hospital, Saint Francis and Connecticut Children’s are all in the room together, and this is the real triumph.”
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