SYRACUSE — The State University of New York (SUNY) has awarded Upstate Medical University a grant that the school will use to establish “precision medicine.”
Upstate Medical will use the 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.
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 Jan. 25 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.
David Amberg, VP for research at Upstate Medical University and principal investigator on the IPCREC grant, explained it using an example related to cancer.
In precision medicine, a researcher or medical professional can sequence the tumor genome, observe the chromosomal rearrangements and mutations in a tumor and eventually determine what combinations of therapy “would be most effective for that patient,” he says.
Amberg spoke with HealthCare Provider on Feb. 1.
He calls it “personalized” medical care based on precision, or “big data.”
“…Which is having everything from an individual’s genome sequence to sequence of their tumors, detailed analysis of everything in their electronic health records and compiling all that data to understand the individual in a more sophisticated way,” says Amberg.
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 hasn’t made a final determination yet, but IPCREC could be part of the Institute for Human Performance, says Amberg.
Upstate Medical will also integrate IPCREC with a molecular-diagnostics facility that is under development in the CNY Biotech Accelerator, he adds.
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 Medical news release.
