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University Of California, Irvine Launches Institute For Precision Health

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The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is launching an Institute for Precision Health. According to the University’s announcement today, the new institute will bring together several of UCI’s strengths - in health sciences, engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, clinical genomics and data science - under the institute’s umbrella, helping advance a rapidly emerging strategy in health care.

Precision Medicine is an approach that’s based on a detailed understanding of an individual’s genes, biological test results, health history, environment, and lifestyle. All this patient data is combined through computer algorithms, predictive modeling and artificial intelligence to arrive at personalized treatment recommendations.

By focusing on how these variables affect a given individual, doctors and researchers can customize treatment and prevention strategies. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, precision medicine develops treatments that are tailor made to fit the needs of a particular patient.

While the term "precision medicine" is relatively new, the concept of individualized treatment is not. Think of a person who needs a blood transfusion. She isn’t given blood from just any donor; instead, the donor’s blood type needs to be matched to the recipient for the transfusion to be safe.

Discoveries in the field of precision medicine are advancing quickly, and the hope is that clinicians will be able to use the new knowledge to improve healthcare in many areas. For example, The Centers For Disease Control now has an Office of Genomics and Precision Public Health, which is the new name for what used to be called the Office of Public Health and Genomics.

And in January, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would spend $170 million over the next five years to advance the field of precision nutrition. That initiative, entitled The Nutrition for Precision Health powered by the All of Us Research Program (NPH), aims to recruit up to 10,000 participants to take part in a variety of research studies at several U. S. universities and academic health centers.

With its new institute, UCI joins a growing list of leading academic health centers - including Johns Hopkins, Columbia, the University of Missouri, Vanderbilt, the University of Pittsburg, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania - that now operate substantial precision medicine programs.

“What we are doing in the Institute for Precision Health is perhaps the most important step that we will take in this generation to improve health and well-being,” said Steve A.N. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP, UCI’s vice chancellor for health affairs.

It is glaringly clear that precision health is how to increase the quality of care while decreasing the costs to both individuals and broader society. A new, patient-controlled, data-driven approach will revolutionize healthcare to focus on prevention, optimal care for each individual, and continuous quality improvement – for example, routine clinical trials will one day be a thing of the past and post-market review of treatments will be the norm,” added Goldstein.

According to UCI, the new center will involve collaborations across seven areas:

      SMART (statistics, machine learning-artificial intelligence) designs software to integrate and analyze health records, molecular data, and observation. This unit will be led by Daniel Gillen, professor and chair of statistics, and Zhaoxia Yu, associate professor of statistics.

     A2IR (applied artificial intelligence research) designs practical solutions for real world clinical problems and cost-effective care. It’s led by Peter Chang, assistant professor-in-residence of radiological sciences.

      A3 (applied analytics and artificial intelligence) brings solutions to inpatient, ambulatory and community settings and pilots new applications. This area is led by Dr. Daniel Chow, assistant professor of radiological sciences.

      Precision omics generates, analyzes, and administers genomic, proteomic, and chemical data. It’s led by Suzanne Sandmeyer, professor of biological chemistry, and Leslie Thompson, the Donald Bren and Chancellor's Professor of psychiatry & human behavior at UCI.

      Collaboratory for health and wellness houses the dynamic analytics platforms and patient-controlled data at the core of the IPH effort. This group is led by Tom Andriola, vice chancellor of information, technology and data and Kai Zheng, professor of informatics.

      Deployable health equity brings the IPH into communities to create solutions to redress deficits in healthcare for vulnerable populations. The unit is led by Dr. Dan Cooper, professor and associate vice chancellor of clinical & translational research, and Bernadette Boden-Albala, founding dean of the planned School of Population & Public Health and director of the Program in Public Health.

      Education and training involves courses, seminars, certificates and degrees in statistics, machine learning-artificial intelligence, omics, and bioinformatics to practitioners and students. 

The institute will take special aim at diseases that heretofore have lacked effective treatments. “For many diseases, especially neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and Parkinson’s, there are simply no treatments available that change the course of those diseases. We’re excited because we know that with precision health, we have the potential to define diseases better, understand them better and treat them far better,” said Dr. Thompson, IPH’s co-director. “We expect major breakthroughs.”

Because the disciplines that comprise IPH already were in place, organizing them into an institute was a next logical step. The Covid-19 pandemic served as a catalyst, an opportunity to test how the university’s faculty and staff could respond to a public health crisis. In 2020, UCI clinicians, biomedical and computer scientists, and public health experts joined forces to create the COVID Vulnerability Index, an assessment tool that points to the type of care best suited for each individual. The tool is now free and available online.

“We couldn’t have had a ‘proof of concept’ with higher stakes than the pandemic,” said Andriola, IPH’s co-director. “We saw in real time how using our capabilities to analyze health data and make customized decisions based on that data led directly to lives saved and shorter hospital stays.” 

The university plans to build a facility to house the institute, which will serve as a home for clinicians, provide the infrastructure to facilitate translational research, and be a location for community outreach and additional commercialization of intellectual discoveries. UCI plans to fund its ongoing operations through a combination of institutional funds, private donations and extramural grants.

“For patients, the message is that UCI’s Institute for Precision Health is the future of your care and wellbeing.” Goldstein said. “For the research community, IPH is wide open opportunity for discoveries that matter. For the business community, IPH is ready to partner to advance new, cost-effective care. And for the philanthropic community – the folks who are determined to change the world – this is it. This is your chance.”

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