Using Leading-Edge Technology to Improve Child Health
Although its technologies are incredibly advanced, the Computational Medicine Center (CMC) supports the fundamental mission that Cincinnati Children's has pursued for more than a hundred years.
"CMC director John Pestian, PhD, and his faculty colleagues at Cincinnati Children's and the University of Cincinnati aim to improve the health of children and the outcomes that follow the management of disease. However, the tools, knowledge and skills available to help us are always evolving," says John Hutton, MD, director of the Division of Biomedical Informatics. "Today the focus is on the function of genes and how they affect our response to our environment. We can determine the structure of many of an individual's genes with relative ease and should be able to predict whether the person will develop a disease and respond to treatment. This is the basis of personalized, preventive and predictive medicine."
The CMC is a collaboration between Cincinnati Children's and the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. With funding and support from Ohio's Third Frontier Project and the National Institutes of Health, the CMC is building teams of research physicians and experts in bioinformatics, genomics, genetics, epidemiology and statistics who work together to improve health. A primary aim is to understand how an individual's genes are expressed to make the person more or less susceptible to disease and more or less likely to respond favorably to treatment with a specific drug or device.
For instance, to help physicians determine the best therapy for children with inherited deafness, John Greinwald Jr., MD, Bruce Aronow, PhD, and colleagues have developed a gene chip to help diagnose the severity of the problem and determine the most beneficial intervention. (Please see accompanying story.) "The CMC is able to mine and analyze the large amount of data generated by these chips, while physicians apply their clinical skills, all for the benefit of children," Dr. Hutton says.
Moving key research developments beyond Cincinnati Children's into widespread use is another goal of the CMC. "We publish our results and patent our intellectual property so that companies can develop them further and make them available around the world," he explains.
"Personalized, predictive medicine essentially involves tailoring modern tools and our understanding of genetics to the individual. Cincinnati Children's is on the leading edge of personalized and computational medicine."
