Abstract
Precision medicine and pharmacogenomics company RPRD (Right Patient Right Drug) Diagnostics is collaborating 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 Hospital is a leader in pre-emptive pharmacogenetics 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 implemented 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 clinical decision support that is needed to use that pharmacogenetic test result in the medical record for real time patient care,” Relling said. “At the current 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 genotyping 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 pharmacogenetics, particularly in pediatrics and pediatric oncology. The example of how we implemented this is an example 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 medical record. “That is an important part of this,” Broeckel added. “Inside the medical record there is decision support, 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.”
David Adams / Wikicommons
