Delaware Reducing the Gap!

As I had talked about in prior posts Coriell has now officially launched the Delaware Personalized Medicine Project. For all of those genome seekers out there, I suggest that you check out this project.

Who is Coriell? Well in case you have never heard of the HapMap before today....

The Coriell Institute for Medical Research is an internationally known not-for-profit, basic biomedical research institution. The Institute's founder, Lewis L. Coriell, M.D., Ph.D., played a major role in bringing the Salk polio vaccine to the public by using cell cultures to study human viral diseases. The Coriell Institute was founded in 1953.

I initially had contact with the people from Coriell in 2005 at ASHG. This is an amazing group of dedicated individuals who are always carrying genetics forward. The Repositories at Coriell provided support to the Human Genome Project, a world-wide program to map the entire human genome, and to the International HapMap Project, a project to provide an efficient tool to identify disease causing genes.



The Delaware Valley Personalized Medicine Project© is a forward thinking, joint effort involving patient volunteers, physicians, scientists, ethicists and information technology experts whose goal is to better understand the coming impact of genome-informed medical practice and to guide its ethical, legal and responsible implementation.

The study will seek to discover presently unknown genes that elevate a patient's risk of cancer, heart disease and other complex diseases, to understand why patients often respond quite differently to treatments, and to explore how the resulting information can best be viewed and utilized by patients themselves and their physicians in a secure, user-friendly environment.

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART!!!!!

All patient volunteers will control their genetic profiles and will be able to determine for themselves whether they wish the information to become part of their personal medical records in the future.



The First Volunteer? A South Jersey Congressman....Maybe they can find the "Crooked Politician Gene"......Just Kidding....sort of :)



The Sherpa Says:

This is exactly what the field of Personalized Medicine needs. Not some project hidden behind fancy marketing and a cool website....or 3 million dollars of seed capital. This project will allow you total control over your genetic information and that is precisely what the public needs. I feel sorry for those who paid to have their SNPs resold at a higher price.