Whilst research in this area is still in its early stages, it is hoped that eventually doctors will be able to use information about a patient ™s genes to predict how they might respond to different medicines and then tailor treatments to suit their individual needs.
This could help to reduce the incidence of adverse drug reactions by making sure that when a patient ™s genetic make-up means that they are likely to react badly to a medicine, alternative treatments are used. Likewise, doctors will be able to improve the effectiveness of some treatments by targeting those patients who are likely to respond well.
The six winning bids include research projects into how genetics could effect responses to drugs used to prevent blood clots and treat epilepsy as well as developing a screening test to identify patients who are at high risk of having a fatal reaction to general anaesthetic.
Lord Warner said:
"I am delighted to announce the successful bidders for this funding. Whilst research in this area is still in its early stages, pharmacogenetics has enormous potential to improve the effectiveness of the treatment that patients receive, and more importantly could save lives by identifying those patients who, because of their genetic make-up, are likely to react badly to certain medicines.
This is part of the government ™s commitment to make sure that NHS patients get the full benefit of the latest developments in genetic knowledge".
The funding is part of a 50 million strategy announced in last year ™s Genetics White Paper.
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The mounds of data these experiments create -- each identifying hundreds of gene candidates -- can be difficult to sift through. But for Chinnaiyan and the research team, the ease with which the data is created meant that a wealth of information about cancers' genetic profiles already existed, although not in a single form or place.
Answering some critics who claim that experimental differences make microarray data virtually impossible to compare, Pandey says that the difficulty actually supports their results. "If some people consider these sets to be so different as to be incomparable, then anything that does turn out to be common to all of them seems pretty likely to be real," he suggests.
The researchers also validated their proposed cancer signature by examining data sets published after creation of the database, dubbed ONCOMINE. The same signature discriminated between cancer and normal tissue in seven of nine new data sets, including properly discriminating three types of cancer not used to create the database, the scientists report.
ONCOMINE connects the cancer microarray database to several sources of additional information, including the scientific literature, the Human Protein Reference Database and Online Inheritance in Man, the online catalog of all proven disease-gene connections. ONCOMINE is owned by the University of Michigan, and is available online to academic researchers free-of-charge following registration.
Authors on the report are Daniel Rhodes, Jianjun Yu, Radhika Varambally, Debashis Ghosh, Terrence Barrette and Chinnaiyan of the University of Michigan Medical School; Kalyan Shanker and Nandan Deshpande of the Institute of Bioinformatics; and Pandey of Johns Hopkins. Pandey does not receive compensation for his role as scientific adviser to the Institute of Bioinformatics.
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