Healthcare magazine for research scientists, labs, pathologists, hospitals, cancer centers, physicians and biopharma companies providing news articles, expert interviews and videos about molecular diagnostics in precision medicine
Issue link: https://clinicalomics.epubxp.com/i/827649
www.clinicalomics.com May/June 2017 Clinical OMICs 41 mixture of those that were able to participate, along with those that could work on one of the five selected use cases ONC selected for the project, Zayas Cabán said. "The field of genetics has exploded in recent decades generating very power- ful information and insights to help manage patient health," said Rishi Kacker, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Counsyl. "However, we continue to uncover just how much we don't yet understand about genetics." According to Kacker, Counsyl has experience gathering and reporting family history and genomic information for nearly a million patients. "We've developed methods to deliver genomic information at a very large scale across all types of providers, health systems and patients—all with different needs." In doing so, Counsyl has discovered that physicians and researchers are often limited by the size and quality of genomic data sets available for investigations. "Electronic health records promise to overcome this barrier, but data is not cap- tured in any standard form and is very difficult to share," Kacker said adding that Sync for Genes will help make collaboration more possible. Jeremy Warner, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informat- ics at Vanderbilt University and medical director of the Vanderbilt Cancer Reg- istry said the pilot will help solve the problems Vanderbilt has faced working on precision cancer medicine. "FHIR is different because it's a pull technology, not a push technology," Dr. Warner said. "The current standard for moving data around is for the sender to push it to the receiver. APIs make data-sharing a pull technology, in that, receivers ask for the data when they need it, and they only ask for the data they need. "This matters a lot in genomics because the raw sequence data is quite substan- tial," Dr. Warner said. "It can bog it down. HL7 is a clinical standard originally meant for clinicians. But FHIR allows it to be used by researchers." One of the biggest roadblocks is that the genetic reports are huge, sometimes 30 pages long, on one patient, Dr. Warner said. It's impossible for a doctor to con- sume a report that size. One of the ways Sync for Genes will help is to allow for a structured app-based solution to help clinicians focus on what matters most to them and to their patients. elenabs / Getty Images Paradigm Diagnostics Launches Personalized Medicine Cancer Registry Pa r a d i g m D i a g n o s t i c s r e c e n t l y announced the launch and IRB approval of the Paradigm registry that will allow physicians to better collect, share, and visualize data to help advance personal- ized medicine in oncology. The registry will build on discoveries from an independent prospective study performed by the Indiana University School of Medicine, published in 2016, which showed 43% of patients received increased progression-free sur vival via Paradigm's multi-omics approach to guide therapy, compared to 5% of patients that did not receive Paradigm's PCDx-guided therapy. Many of the patients that demonstrated exceptional responses were treated based upon ther- apeutic associations derived from Par- adigm's mRNA and protein expression analysis. " The Paradigm registry allows easy data collection and collaboration sup- ported by informatics tools to pro- vide opportunities for physician-lead research," said Janakiraman Subrama- nian, M.D., of St. Luke's Cancer Institute, and a co-Investigator on the Paradigm registry. "We look forward to helping expand this project quickly across multi- (continued on next page) (continued on next page)