I have had to sit out of the blogging game for 4 days. This was a self imposed punishment to help me get re-oriented. I have been working hard on the practices and have been talking to many different people about our next steps. So I apologize.
There are some neat things going on in the field of Personalized Medicine lately. My old friend The Mount Sinai Hospital will be offering CYP 2C9 and VKORC1 testing for Warfarin dosing. This is in addition to the other corporate labs which are already offering it, such as LabCorp, Kimball, Genzyme....
Why? I think this is part of a greater play by academic centers. Notably, Mt Sinai has a Institute of Personalized Medicine. This department was endowed by Samuel Bronfman's Philanthropic Arm. They have a mission which is to bring personalized medcine research to a point where it is ready to launch.....
They are also setting up a bio bank, offering money for people's genomes. Sound familiar? I had just talked about 23andMe possibly using their data in a similar way.....Except the investigators would be making money off of the research subjects...
Here's the difference....The Mount Sinai School of Medicine will be doing research on their own. Notably they have been doing it already. Despite some scuttlebutt about turf wars at a big institution they have started to play nice in the sandbox and put out some good research. This article I find especially timely. we have always known that genotypic variation plays a role in the metabolism of certain drugs. In this case, 2D6 metabolism has an even more important in the Ashkenazi Jewish. Here they find twice as many persons af Ashkenazi heritage have ultrarapid 2D6 metabolism. This enzyme is the key player in many psychiatric medications....
The Sherpa Says: I am absolutely certain that ethnicity will play a huge variable in the frequency of these ultra-rapid metabolizers of any medication. Pharmacogenomics may be meeting genealogy sooner than we think....Thanks to Sherpa Hsien for helping me with a SNP issue the other day......
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