Two demonstration projects that aim to yield quick results for patients have been selected by the new California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, a public-private effort launched by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. The initiative is being hosted by UC San Francisco, in conjunction with UC Health, which comprises the University of California’s five medical centers.
Both projects involve extensive collaborations within the UC system and with other academic medical centers in California, as well as patient advocates and companies in Silicon Valley and the biotech industry. They were selected by an expert review panel from a highly competitive group of proposals submitted by collaborative teams around the state.
One of the winning proposals will harness big data bioinformatics to help doctors identify effective treatments for California children with cancer who fail to respond to standard therapies. The other will enable detection of all known pathogens with a single DNA sequencing test, to diagnose acute infections in hospitalized patients.
“Both of these projects are developing exciting new tools that promise to deliver precision medicine tests and therapies to patients within a very short timeframe, as quickly as 18 months to two years,” said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, who directs UCSF’s Institute for Computational Health Sciences and is heading the precision medicine initiative. “We hope the success of these first two projects will inspire others to support this initiative, so we can fund additional promising precision medicine projects to help patients.”
Leveraging Big Data in Pediatric Cancer
A team led by David Haussler, PhD, a professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and Theodore Goldstein, PhD,a research associate at UC Santa Cruz, will develop a secure Internet-based networking system to match cancer therapies to individual children based on the genetic characteristics of their tumors.
The California Kids Cancer Comparison will enable clinicians to sort through a much larger pool of genetic data than has previously been available, including tumor sequencing data from children throughout California and around the world, as well as from adults. It also will enable patients, their advocates, clinicians and researchers to upload, analyze and communicate genomic information and associated data through MedBook, a social media platform that maintains privacy and security for patients' data.
The project includes investigators from UC Irvine, UCSF and Stanford University, as well as the University of Southern California, the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, including UCLA and UCSD, UC Davis, Hyundai Cancer Institute at Children's Hospital of Orange County, Children’s Hospital Philadelphia and the Translational Genomics Research Institute.
The team includes such industry partners as NuMedii, Cisco Systems and DNAnexus. And it builds on the UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Childhood Cancer Project, which enables combined analysis of adult and pediatric cancer genomic data sets, including those generated by the National Cancer Institute’s tumor genomics initiatives, as well as pediatric clinical sequencing trials.
"Our goal is simple: Every kid in California with cancer who needs a second chance, should get a second chance," Haussler said. "Currently, too many kids are not getting the full advantage of complete genomic analysis of their tumors. If the standard treatment does not cure a child with cancer, then we need to be doing all that we possibly can to use genomic analysis to come up with an alternate therapy."