Nearly 700,000 emergency department visits each year are due to adverse medication interactions, as doctors and patients often must resort to a process of trial and error to find the medication, dosage, and/or medication mixture most effective for each patient.
A newly announced research effort aims to make medications safer and more effective by studying the environmental, genetic, and lifestyle factors that contribute to both drug efficacy and negative drug interactions.
The project, called Individual Metabolome and Exposome Assessment for Pharmaceutical Optimization (IndiPHARM), will partner researchers from Emory University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and Mayo Clinic on the largest-ever study into advancing understanding of why medications act differently across patient populations.
“This project exemplifies how cutting-edge technologies and scientific collaborations across institutions and sectors can promote human progress and reduce suffering. IndiPHARM promises nothing less than to revolutionize pharmacology and patient care,” Katrina Armstrong, MD, interim president of Columbia University, the lead institution for the IndiPHARM project, said in a release.
IndiPHARM is funded by $39.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency established in 2022 to support research projects that can lead to transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs. It is the most resources ever dedicated to advancing the science of measuring the exposome—the total environmental exposures a person encounters in their life and their biological response to those exposures—and applying it for personalized medicine.
“We hope to bring measurement of the environment into the clinic, so we can see how it impacts our responses to different drug treatments and how it can potentially influence disease outcomes,” says Doug Walker, PhD, associate professor in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “This is a really revolutionary project in that it allows us to more comprehensively study the exposures we experience as humans and bring that measurement into a setting that will potentially provide us with actionable advice to help protect human health.”
Emory University’s distinct portion of the project will be led by Walker and Xin Hu, PhD, also from the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Rollins; and Dean Jones, PhD, and Young-Mi Go, PhD, from the Department of Medicine at Emory School of Medicine. Walker, Hu, and Jones are also members of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute.
Last year, a project led by another team of Emory researcher became the first-ever recipient of APRA-H funding when it was awarded $24.8 million to develop a programmable approach to prevent, treat, and potentially cure various diseases.
“It goes to show that Emory faculty are at the cutting edge of science and pushing forward what’s possible in developing technologies that improve health,” Walker said.