Projects

The 1200 Patients Project

The 1200 Patients Project aims to develop a new model for personalized medical care through preemptive pharmacogenomics. Enrolled patients provide a single blood sample for analysis, which is genotyped by an in-house CLIA-certified laboratory. Patients’ genetic information is compared to a database of well-substantiated pharmacogenomic research compiled by the 1200 Patients Project team, which is constantly updated to reflect the most current research available. This database is used to determine whether it is likely that a patient will respond positively or negatively to a medication.

The ACCOuNT Project

The African-American Cardiovascular Pharmacogenomics Consortium (ACCOuNT) is an NIH-supported, multi-institutional group of physicians, researchers, and patients whose goal is to reduce disparity in precision medicine, particularly for African-Americans. The ACCOuNT Translational project aims to explore the feasibility of implementing preemptive pharmacogenomic result delivery for African-Americans in the inpatient setting across multiple institutions. The ACCOuNT Translational project is led by principal investigator Dr. Peter O’Donnell (University of Chicago) and site leads Drs. Kevin O’Leary (Northwestern University) and Edith Nutescu (University of Illinois at Chicago).

ImPress Trial

The goal of the ImPreSS Trial is to develop a model of implementing point-of-care pharmacogenomic decision support in the perioperative care setting. Anesthesiologists and critical care and pain management physicians and associated providers (nurse anesthetists, physician assistants, and pharmacists) within the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care (DACC) will be targeted for enrollment through a process of direct stakeholder engagement and informed consent. Adult patients with planned elective inpatient or outpatient surgeries will be eligible for the study. Enrolled patients provide a blood sample during their pre-operative clinic at the Anesthesia Perioperative Medicine Clinic (APMC), which is sent to our CLIA-certified laboratory for genotyping, and results will be available before the patient’s surgical admission. Patients’ genotyping results will be delivered to providers through our online web portal, the Genomic Prescribing System (GPS), which is currently integrated into our institutional electronic medical record.

PhOCus Trial

The Implementation of Pharmacogenomic Testing in Oncology Care (PhOCus) trial is a randomized, prospective study to evaluate the effects of preemptive pharmacogenomic (PGx) testing on chemotherapy dosing decisions and medication related adverse events in oncology patients. We will focus on two specific medications with actionable PGx evidence and common use as chemotherapies in adult malignancies which to date have not been prospectively studied with respect to clinical outcomes in a randomized fashion: fluoropyrimidines and irinotecan. These agents have activity in multiple tumor types and are critical to many oncology patients’ care, with hundreds of thousands of new exposures per year in the United States cancer population.

Personalized Therapeutics Clinic

“Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Personalized Therapeutics Clinic on Drug-Drug and Drug-Gene Interactions,” or the “Personalized Therapeutics Study” for short, combines the use of pharmacogenomics with the establishment of the novel Personalized Therapeutics Clinic (PTC) at UChicago Medicine. Participants in this study ultimately have the opportunity to undergo genetic testing and have subsequent results analyzed to determine potentially-adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and drug-gene interactions (DGIs). For those participants whose DNA is genetically tested, they also have the opportunity to attend a virtual appointment(s) with a healthcare provider from the PTC who will discuss with participants the genetic results and their implications.

As this is a clinical study, patients who consent to this study will be assigned to one of three different groups. The assignment to one of the following cohorts is completely random and computer generated:

Regular care with your doctors (NO genotyping and NO PTC)
Regular care AND a virtual appointment with the PTC (NO genotyping)
Regular care AND DNA genotyping AND a virtual appointment with the PTC

Regardless of the group to which patients are assigned, they still have the benefit of being offered genetic testing and PTC virtual appointment(s) after 9 months of being enrolled in the study. Everyone’s genome is unique, and we are excited to present the patients of UChicago Medicine with this opportunity to better understand and govern their healthcare. By providing this study to our patients, we hope to better understand current prescribing practices, identify the convenience of a personalized therapeutics clinic, and ultimately decrease potentially-dangerous DDIs and DGIs.