University of Colorado Health, Others Partner for Center for Personalized Medicine

Aurora-based University of Colorado Health, the University of Colorado School of Medicine, University Physicians and Children's Hospital Colorado in Aurora have partnered to form the Center for Personalized Medicine and Biomedical Informatics.

The new center will be one of the first in the nation to integrate genetics into patient care, according to UCHealth. The center will use patients' DNA to help predict the risk of disease and identify individualized targeted therapies.

"This program will fundamentally change the way we offer care for patients by moving from a reactive system where we treat patients with established disease to a proactive system where we predict who will develop disease and identify disease in its very earliest stages," said David Schwartz, MD, chair of the University of Colorado Department of Medicine, in a news release.

The Center for Personalized Medicine, which will be based on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, will have four main aims, according to the release:

•    Prevent disease
•    Predict a patient's course of disease and how they will respond to treatment
•    Identify each patient's right dose of a drug and discover possible adverse reactions prior to prescribing
•    Research through a DNA bank for unknown sequences and DNA markers that could mean susceptibility to disease

Over the next five years, UCHealth, University of Colorado School of Medicine and Colorado Children's will add clinicians, nurses, researchers, genetic counselors, a DNA bank and a data warehouse to make the center a statewide resource. For instance, the DNA bank will sequence and analyze DNA samples from across the region.

"While the Center for Personalized Medicine will be one of the only centers of its kind in the world, our aim is to share these resources as broadly as possible throughout UCHealth's network of hospitals and clinics, and eventually beyond our system, increasing the health of patients everywhere," said Bill Neff, MD, CEO of UCHealth, in the release.

More Articles on Personalized Medicine:
Genome Sequencing Indicates MRSA Infection Severity
IBM's Watson, New York Genome Center Partner to Bring Personalized Medicine to Cancer Patients
What the JAMA Study on the Pitfalls of Using Genetic Markers for Clinical Decisions Means for the Future of Personalized Medicine

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