NEW YORK – University of Michigan spinout InheRET said on Thursday that it has received a $2 million Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Cancer Institute to expand its Inherited Risk Evaluation Tool (InheRET) to identify patients at risk for hereditary disease.
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based InheRET will use the two-year grant, which was awarded Sept. 10, to further improve the platform, increase integration with electronic health records, and increase its workforce and end userbase.
InheRET said the platform provides a personalized medicine approach to curb barriers that patients and clinicians may face for prevention of and early detection of hereditary disease. The platform identifies patients at increased risk for hereditary cancers and offers next-step recommendations and tailored educational resources for users.
InheRET noted that its cancer risk evaluation has been in pilot testing at Michigan Medicine, with more than 1,000 patients having completed the study. More than 80 percent of patients who began the program completed it. Among the primary care patients in the pilot study, 30 percent were identified as meeting criteria for additional genetic risk evaluation related to hereditary or familiar cancer syndromes.