NIH names Vanderbilt University as Precision Medicine Initiative research hub
The National Institutes of Health chose Vanderbilt University Medical Center to serve as its Data and Research Support Center for the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program.
Over the next five years, NIH with provide VUMC with $71.6 million to both establish and operate the research center.
The PMI Cohort program is supported by approximately $55 million from the NIH. The program will begin to enroll volunteers in the fall and is projected to meet its enrollment goal by 2020. The Participant Technologies Center will manage the direct enrollment of volunteers and develop mobile technologies for the participants to record real-time lifestyle data.
“We’re honored to be selected to play a foundational role in a program that promises to drive innovation in precision medicine for decades to come,” VUMC CEO Jeff Balser, MD, said in a statement. “The Precision Medicine Initiative gives urgency to making patient care far more personal; unlocking the key intelligence we need to tailor diagnosis and treatment for the genetic and environmental features of every individual.”
The research center will both accumulate and organize the immense dataset of precision medicine indicators, while providing research and analytics tools to its scientists.
Josh Denny, MD, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University, will head the research center and act as co-chair of the PMI Cohort Program Steering and Executive Committees.
“Precision medicine transcends any particular clinical specialty, any disease and any one patient type,” Denny added. “There’s a very real human need for better precision medicine tools and approaches. In the PMI we will launch a new paradigm of research that puts participants in the center of biomedical discovery, and we’ll do it efficiently, at massive scale, with the goal of supporting the translation of data to discovery as fast as possible.”
VUMC will collaborate with researchers from Harvard University, MIT’s Broad Institute, Columbia Medical Center, University of Michigan School of Public Health, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the University of Texas School of Bioinformatics. The center will be also supported by Google’s Verily Life Sciences.
Twitter: @JessieFDavis
Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com
