NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Coriell Personalized Medicine Institute and the Ohio State University will collaborate to study how useful genomic information and genetic counseling is to doctors and patients in clinical practice and in informing behavior.
The OSU and Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative (CPMC) project will use patients recruited through OSU doctors and will incorporate the use of electronic medical records and genomic information to find out whether genomic medicine and genetic counseling has utility in practice, and how doctors and patients use this information when it is available.
The study will focus on congestive heart failure (CHF) and hypertension and will involve up to 1,800 patients who have been diagnosed with these disorders. OSU's Ross Heart Hospital will recruit up to 900 patients with CHF and OSU internal medicine doctors will recruit 900 patient with high blood pressure.
"We hope to show the benefit of genetic counseling on these particular patients," said Kevin Sweet, a genetic counselor and co-investigator of the study at OSU, said in a statement. "We want to know if consistent support and follow through affect patients' willingness to initiate lifestyle changes and whether a better understanding of disease risk and utilization of risk reports prompts ongoing communication with their physician."
"Another very important goal of the study is to educate physicians on the use of genomic information and implementing genetic counseling in everyday clinical practice," added Clay Marsh, executive director of OSU's Center for Personalized Health Care.
The research also will examine whether genetic data may be used to differentiate CHF patients who respond to treatment compared to those who do not respond to standard treatments. The study also aims to find out if this information could be used to predict which newly diagnosed patients with hypertension will require adjustments to their medications.
"We hope to identify unique genetic signatures between these two groups," Sweet said, by looking for SNPs associated with drugs that are commonly used to treat the disorder.
As part of the collaboration, OSU will recruit 200 volunteers from central Ohio into the CPMC, which will use family history and non-genetic and behavioral factors, such as smoking and body mass index, to develop personalized risk reports.
OSU will provide Coriell with saliva samples that will be tested for around 2 million SNPs using microarrays. The results will be used to determine an individual's genetic risk for a number of common diseases, such as colon cancer, coronary artery disease, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and patient response to drugs, such as warfarin.