Business First of Columbus
by Carrie Ghose
Ohio State University Medical Center plans to join a coalition for research and clinical application of personalized medicine, a growing movement that aims to replace buckshot treatments with pinpoint aim.
Medical Center administrators are scheduled to ask trustees Friday to approve creating the P4 Medicine Institute, an arm’s-length nonprofit affiliate for personalized health care. The institute would be a joint venture with Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology and its founder, Dr. Leroy Hood, who invented processes that made it easier to crack the codes of human genes.
Administrators outlined the initiative Wednesday to the 22-member Medical Center Board and trustees’ audit committee and medical affairs committee members on Thursday unanimously recommended approving the institute’s creation. The Medical Center Board, formed last fall by trustees, includes the heads of the system’s five hospital boards plus university and public representatives.
Hood coined the term P4 to represent hallmarks of a new way of practicing medicine that is personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory. Through research in Seattle and Columbus, and clinical trials run by Ohio State, the institute will seek to design diagnostic tests, drugs and protocols that prevent or treat disease based on patients’ individual genetic risks, diet and other factors.
“We want to transform waiting for people to get sick into treatments that help people stay well,” said Dr. Clay Marsh, Ohio State’s senior associate vice president for health sciences in research and head of its 5-year-old personalized medicine center.
Americans spent up to $232 billion last year on personalized health products, a wide category that encompasses targeted genetic testing to custom workouts with a personal trainer, according to an October study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. That could grow to between $344 billion and $452 billion by 2015.
Ohio State was among the first of dozens of universities to join the national Personalized Medicine Coalition. The P4 initiative follows similar partnerships this year, such as the Ignite Institute in Virginia and a venture of Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health System with Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute.
The Medical Center would kick in $1 million in seed money over two years.
The institute could generate at least $50 million in grants and commercial activity in five years, Marsh said. New tests should be developed in the first few yeas and major changes in how patients are treated will be seen in five years, Hood said.
“In 10 years, every sector of the health-care industry will have to fundamentally rewrite their business plans,” Hood said.
Some companies, including drug and device manufacturers and some hospital systems, will go out of business, he said.
"Where there is failure there is enormous opportunity for economic advancement," Hood said, and the P4 Institute will be poised to fill the void.
Hood argues no other clinical-research partnership has the scope of either resources or approach as P4. Instead of just focusing on gene sequencing, for instance, it’s looking at every aspect of health and every treatment tool available.
Challenges facing the field include nudging both federal regulators and insurance payments to leave the 19th century, said Dr. Fred Lee, the institute’s executive director. The current reimbursement system rewards value rather than quality.
Audit committee members on Thursday also gave thumbs up to two other affiliates, one to run the university’s new office for connections with alumni and business in China, and BioHio Research Park for industry collaborations at the university's Wooster-based Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.
Trustees have been seeking a tighter rein on affiliated entities, which include some for-profit ventures, ever since an aborted effort by the Medical Center in 2006 to build an atomic therapy cancer center in Dublin. The university took a $5.7 million line of credit two years ago to wind down that affiliate, UMC Partners, and now is pursuing a different atomic therapy idea in collaboration with other Columbus hospitals.
Originally post on Business First Columbus
on May 13th, 2010
