September 2024- Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine will play a key role in groundbreaking research funded by an award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The research will explore how environmental exposures interact with genetics to affect people’s responses to medications — a field known as pharmacoexposomics.

The five-year award, called IndiPHARM, aspires to develop and execute a state-of-the-art high-resolution, precision monitoring system that aims to evaluate how a large group of people varies in response to drugs for metabolic diseases. The prime research site will be Columbia University, with support from Mayo Clinic, Emory University, Harvard University, Brown University and the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut.

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This collaboration aims to address why medicines for some metabolic diseases, such as obesity, work for some people and not others and will look at the role environmental exposures — such as chemicals, pollution, diet and lifestyle — may play in people’s genetic response.

Mayo Clinic will use its expertise in genomic research, a large exome dataset of more than 100,000 adult patients that includes all protein-coding genes, and comprehensive longitudinal phenotypes from electronic health records to identify unique patient populations and improve understanding of drug responses. Mayo will oversee the enrollment of study participants as well as the collection and processing of biospecimens to ensure the data meets high-quality standards for analysis.

Importantly, Mayo investigators will interpret the metabolism of the chosen medications based on available exome sequencing testing of 4,000 participants with metabolic disease and how these observations relate to drug side effects and disease outcomes.