A $4.4-million cash infusion for Lawson Health Research Institute will help researchers tailor medical treatments to individual patients with the hope of cutting down on deadly drug reactions.
One-third of the multi-million dollar funding boost announced Monday is from the province, while the rest of the cash came from Thermo Fisher Scientific and London Health Sciences Foundation donors. The money will be used to expand the current personalized medicine program at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).
Lawson researchers, led by clinical pharmacologist Dr. Richard Kim, have been analyzing patient DNA to predict how they will respond to medications. Specifically, they look for genetic changes that would alter the way a person responds to individual drugs.
“For every medication, there are patients who should be prescribed lower or higher than the recommended standard dose and patients who should be prescribed an entirely different medication,” said Kim. “Personalized medicine studies a patient’s unique DNA to ensure he or she is prescribed the right dose of the right medication at the right time.”
Ensuring patients are prescribed a drug their bodies can metabolize and properly process cuts down on adverse drug reactions, which are the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals and cost Canada's health care system $5-billion annually.
With the new money, researchers will also be able to examine whether the patient benefits outweigh the cost of the program.
“We will examine patients’ healthcare utilization to prove how effective our program can be,” said Kim. “Through the development of secure and scalable technologies as well as a personalized model of patient care, we hope to demonstrate that our model of personalized medicine can be adopted by other health care providers across the province as an innovative and cost-effective way to enhance the health of Ontarians."
The LHSC was the first hospital in Canada to implement personalized medicine as a clinical strategy. The practice began in 2008 through Kim’s research on warfarin – a blood thinner prescribed to treat blood clots. It has now expanded to include patients at the London Regional Cancer Program prescribed the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil.