VUMC snags grant for White House precision medicine program

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will lead a pilot program in the early stage of the precision medicine initiative established by the White House.

President Barack Obama announced the precision medicine initiative in his 2015 State of the Union address. The goal is to map the genome of 1 million Americans to better understand how medicine can be tailored to an individual for better, personalized treatment. Precision medicine is being used in oncology to treat cancers and tumors, although tailoring treatment to an individual's genetic makeup could be used to treat other diseases.

"We are excited to play an important role in developing the president’s precision medicine initiative, as we work together to advance the understanding of how to enhance health and treat diseases," said Dr. Jeff Balser, vice chancellor for Health Affairs and dean of VUMC. "Our institutional investments in precision medicine, which began more than a decade ago, are bearing fruit, and we have an outstanding group of individuals in place to lead this effort."

VUMC is receiving a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health under the Precision Medicine Cohort Program, which will work toward the best ways of engaging with potential volunteers and test methods of data collection.

VUMC will be working with Verily, formerly called Google Life Sciences, the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and the University of Michigan.

As part of the program, VUMC will design a prototype website that appeals to a diverse group of potential volunteers, as well as create a digital form for getting consent.

Volunteers involved in the pilot will help researchers pinpoint the best ways to engage with future participants, which will allow the program to build "durable relationships," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH, in a prepared statement.

Dr. Josh Denny, associate professor of biomedical informatics and medicine, will be the lead investigator for the NIH-funded program.

The initiative is "a grand experiment: on a scale that has never been tested before," Denny said.

"We’ll pilot how to authentically engage individuals to participate in the program and build the initial informatics and Web infrastructures to support it,” Denny said.

NIH will announce which institutes will be involved in the full implementation, including a coordinating center and participating health care organizations who interact with patients.

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander called the grant "good news" and said that the program will benefit millions of people.

“This is also a big compliment to Vanderbilt, a university at the forefront of biomedical research," said Alexander, chairman of the Senate health committee, in a prepared statement. "I’m committed to supporting the president’s precision medicine initiative through our Senate health committee’s innovation agenda to ensure Americans can take advantage of this remarkable time in science.”

Reach Holly Fletcher at 615-259-8287 or on Twitter @hollyfletcher.