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SUNY awards Upstate Medical grant to launch institute for precision medicine in cancer care

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Upstate Medical University will use a grant of $575,000 to launch the SUNY Institute for Precision Cancer Research, Education and Care (IPCREC), a new initiative of the medical school and its partners.

Upstate Medical will use IPCREC to establish “precision medicine.”

Precision medicine involves compiling data on patients and their conditions from various sources and then using that information to “tailor treatment specific to that exact patient,” Upstate Medical said in a news release posted Monday on its website.

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The medical school describes precision medicine as “the latest innovation in personalized health care” and considers it the “foundation” of the IPCREC.

SUNY awarded the $575,000 grant from its performance and investment fund, Upstate Medical said.

Upstate’s IPCREC program was one of 32 that SUNY selected for funding from 211 submissions.

Partnering campuses include SUNY Oswego, Onondaga Community College, and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Upstate Medical projects the program will launch in 2016.

The medical school will house the facility in the CNY Biotech Accelerator and the Institute for Human Performance after crews finish remodeling work.

“Precision medicine provides an incredible opportunity to provide care that is tailor made to each patient and each tumor,” David Amberg, VP for research at Upstate Medical University and principle investigator on the IPCREC grant, said in the release. “The IPCREC will align the resources and infrastructure needed to bring this personalized care into our clinics.”

IPCREC will bring together vast amounts of data, technology to compile the data, experts to interpret it, and clinicians to implement “improved and better informed” treatments for patients, Upstate Medical said.

Ultimately, IPCREC will fuse the patient’s personal data to the cancer treatments in clinic.

Examples of data that the organization will mine include a patient’s genome sequence, the genome sequence of his/her tumor, detailed electronic health records, and big data biomarker information obtained through proteomics and metabolomics.

The proposal will integrate Upstate’s IPCREC with SUNY Oswego’s computational precision biomedicine lab, “aligning” resources to serve students, patients, and the community.

The award represents “only part” of the overall grant, which includes funding requests for staffing, technology, equipment, facilities and other program needs, according to the Upstate news release.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com

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