Clinical OMICS

NOV-DEC 2017

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

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14 Clinical OMICs November/December 2017 www.clinicalomics.com In the Clinic RPRD Partners with St. Jude to Offer Comprehensive Pharmacogenetics Testing Aevi Genomic Medicine Announces Completion of $28 Million Private Placement Aevi Genomic Medicine announced in October the completion of a private placement of 22.2 million shares of its common stock that raised aggregate proceeds of $28 million, before expenses. The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Foundation (CHOP Foundation) was the lead investor, and has committed to pro- vide up to an additional $5 million of equity financing through June 30, 2018. Aevi will use the net proceeds of the finance to further the development of its two lead clinical programs, to support its ongoing collaboration with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, to develop additional drug candidates and for gen- eral corporate purposes. The company's research and devel- opment efforts leverage its internal genomics platform and its ongoing col- laboration with the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Its focus is to develop therapies for pediatric onset, life-alter- ing diseases. The company currently has two programs in clinical development, AEVI-001 for mGLuR+ ADHD and AEVI- 002 for severe pediatric onset Crohn's disease that have resulted from this collaboration. n Precision medicine and pharmacog- enomics company RPRD (Right Patient Right Drug) Diagnostics is collaborat- ing with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, whereby RPRD will provide preemptive clinical pharmacogenetics testing for St. Jude's PG4KDS program. St. Jude Children's Research Hos- pital is a leader in pre-emptive phar- macogenetics having first conducted a pharmacogenetics research study in 1986 for a specific gene that informed proper dosing an anticancer drug for children. St. June continued its research in this area and in 2011 imple- mented a program call PG4KDS, based on it accumulated research over the past 25 years. According to Mary Relling, Pharm.D., principal investigator of the PG4KDS program and chair of the pharmaceutical department at St. Jude, the PG4KDS protocol is designed as preemptive genotyping of patients to help inform clinical decisions. "We try to enroll every patient at St. Jude who we expect will receive any medications and we develop the clin- ical decision support that is needed to use that pharmacogenetic test result in the medical record for real time patient care," Relling said. "At the cur- rent time we have eight or nine genes affecting 20 or 30 medications, so that if a patient has a high-risk genetic test result we use that with interruptive clinical decision support to modify prescribing for our patients. based on those results." RPRD's collaboration with St. Jude uses the pharmacogenomics genotyp- ing platform PharmacoScan Solution from Thermo Fisher Scientific, which was introduced last year. Pharmaco- Scan was developed in collaboration with pharmacogenomics consortia and Ulrich Broeckel, M.D., founder and CEO of RPRD Diagnostics and a key collaborator on its content selection. St. Jude is clearly a leader in the implementation of clinical pharmaco- genetics, particularly in pediatrics and pediatric oncology. The example of how we implemented this is an exam- ple of what we would like to bring to other institutions," said Broeckel. "Every child who goes to St. Jude get approached is they would like to be comprehensively genotyped." For every patient that participates in PG4KDS, the pharmacogenomics is implemented in their electronic medi- cal record. "That is an important part of this," Broeckel added. "Inside the medical record there is decision sup- port, so when a physician wants to order a particular drug or change a prescription for a patient the decision support helps advise the physicians if the drug is appropriate, if there is another drug, or to adjust the dose of the current drug."—Chris Anderson AndrijTer / Getty Images David Adams / Wikicommons

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