NEW YORK – A multicenter research effort is underway to develop a platform and monitoring system for preventing adverse drug interactions due to patients' genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors.
According to an announcement Wednesday, the Columbia University-led effort, dubbed IndiPHARM, which is short for individual metabolome and exposome assessment for pharmaceutical optimization, recently received $39.5 million in funding from the US Department of Health and Human Services' Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Researchers at Columbia University, along with collaborators at Harvard Medical School, Emory University, Brown University, and the Jackson Laboratory, hope to commercialize the technology they develop within this project.
"Medications have the potential to reduce suffering, alleviate symptoms, prevent serious events, and help people live longer and healthier lives," Gary Miller, vice dean for research strategy and innovation and a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, there is a gap between what drugs are predicted to do and what they actually do in the real world." Miller, who researches exposomics, or the study of the cumulative exposures an individual experiences during their life, is leading the IndiPHARM project.
Drugs affect people differently due to individual differences in genetic makeup and environmental exposures, among other factors. Researchers within IndiPHARM will initially focus on patients with metabolic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver disease and common conditions that occur with these diseases, such as hypertension and depression.
Within IndiPHARM, researchers will measure hundreds of drugs and their metabolites, as well as thousands of chemicals derived from patients because of their environment, diet, and lifestyle factors. Specifically, researchers will draw on information from multiple diabetes clinical trials, the Mayo Clinic's TAPESTRY study, and electronic health record data from the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics program. Within these data, researchers aim to pinpoint relationships between drugs and treatment outcomes, including physiological states associated with suboptimal outcomes.
Eventually, researchers plan to translate their research into tests that identify factors, such as patients' diets or chemicals they've been exposed to at work, that might interfere with and limit the efficacy of drugs they're taking. Researchers are also developing tools to automate sample preparation and optimize mass spectrometry protocols.
IndiPHARM plans to commercialize the technology generated under this research project with the help of consulting advisers and partners, including Columbia Tech Ventures, AlleyCorp, Thermo Fisher, MBX Capital, and Amazon Web Services.