CU system resets health care with $63M personalized medicine division

Research assistant Natalie Thomas pulls a slice of a cancerous tumor for analysis at the Anschutz Medical Campus. (Andy Cross, The Denver Post)

Ellen Smith received a death sentence for her advanced lung cancer five years ago, but it was commuted by a revolution in human genetics, drug therapies and clinical approaches unfolding at the University of Colorado Hospital.

The advances have saved her life, by her reckoning, four times.

The accelerating speed of DNA sequencing, drug development and data analysis has led UCHealth, the University of Colorado Medical School and Children's Hospital Colorado to join in an effort to fundamentally change the way they care for patients.

The partnership will invest more than $63 million over the next five years to create a new division, adding clinicians, genetic counselors, researchers and advanced practice nurses and also expanding a DNA bank and advanced data warehouse. It's called the Center for Personalized Medicine and Biomedical Informatics.

The pioneering field of personalized medicine uses molecular analysis to determine a patient's predisposition to developing certain diseases and to deliver tailored medical treatment.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this will change how we treat disease, how we teach our students, how physicians work, how we raise our kids and how we conduct public health policy," Dr. David Schwartz, chair of the CU Department of Medicine, said of the center.

The DNA bank, Schwartz said, probably will require a year of discussion with physicians, academicians, lawyers, ethicists and patient advocates about what it really means to secure patients' genetic blueprints and how they should be used.

While the center will be based on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, it will serve UCHealth's five hospitals and Children's Hospital. The DNA bank would sequence and analyze samples from around the region.

The benefits of personalized medicine have been evident for several years in cancer treatment, said Dr. Dan Theodorescu, director of the CU Cancer Center. It's why the center's survival rates are significantly better for certain types of cancers than the average national outcomes, he said. The new center will bring these kinds of lifesaving therapies to all disease fronts while providing more laboratory and analytical power to evaluate cancer DNA, he said.

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CU system resets health care with $63M personalized medicine division