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Buffalo (WBEN) -- Roswell Park Cancer Institute is moving forward with its Center for Personalized Medicine.
The new center treats cancer patients with personalized medical care and also creates a resource that scientists and medical providers can use for applications across the spectrum of clinical care.
Lieutenant Gov. Robert Duffy on Wednesday morning joined organization officials as they announced the facility is expanding, having leveraged additional private investments for further growth.
The Center for Personalized Medicine has leveraged $18.5 million in additional investments from an initial state investment of $5.1 million.
Roswell Park described personalized medicine as "an approach to diagnosing, treating, and managing disease by looking for clues in a person's biomedical makeup. By 'sequencing' or doing robust analysis on the whole set of DNA that each of us inherits from our parents - our 'genomes' - scientists can try to figure out why some people are more likely than others to get certain diseases, and which treatments are most likely to be effective for a particular person."
Roswell Park received $5.1 million in state assistance for this project through the Western New York Regional Council in December 2011.
The new center represents the region’s first resource for next-generation gene sequencing to meet federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) standards. In addition to the $5.1 million received from the State, Roswell Park has invested $16 million in equipment and infrastructure. At the same time, Computer Task Group (CTG), a national leader in healthcare information technology, has pledged another $2.5 million toward the Center. Additional collaborators include the University at Buffalo, IMMCO Diagnostics and Western New York Urology Associates LLC.
The combination of high-throughput and personal gene sequencers in the center, along with its dedicated 1,600-processor supercomputing cluster, will allow Roswell Park and its collaborators to analyze individual genomes — a person’s unique genetic code, representing the full set of DNA that we inherit from our parents — shedding light on key factors that drive medical care.
CTG, a Buffalo-based company that is one of the largest U.S. healthcare information technology (IT) companies and has developed leading bioinformatics computing and software, has played a major role in the development of the CPM, providing significant strategic direction and intending to contribute $2.5 million toward its development.
Over the last 25 years, CTG has provided healthcare IT, and operational and strategic consulting support to over 600 healthcare organizations. CTG employs nearly 400 of its 3,800 employees in Western New York.
The Center’s first sequencing projects represent a three-pronged translational research initiative. Roswell Parkl has launched clinical research studies that set out to:
- Predict on a case-by-case, personalized basis which of the two main types of standard chemotherapy, anthracycline-based or platinum-based, will be most effective in treating a woman’s breast cancer, and with fewest adverse side effects;
- Develop, in collaboration with Western New York Urology Associates, a diagnostic test for superficial bladder cancer, the ninth most common cancer in the U.S. and the most expensive of all cancers in terms of cost to treat; and
- Engage 600 healthy volunteers representing the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic and geographic diversity of the eight-county Western New York region in an initiative to identify the particular healthcare priorities of this community, aided by a mobile tissue-collection unit that will travel to disparate and underserved areas.
In addition, Roswell Park expects to use the resources of the CPM in planning individualized care for its lung, melanoma and leukemia patients in the near future.
