Mayo Clinic Awarded $3.5 Million to Advance Bioinformatic and Genomic Research on Heart Attacks and Peripheral Arterial Disease

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Physicians know that genetics play a role in some heart and vascular diseases. Mayo Clinic researchers are using bioinformatics — high-tech computational approaches to handling immense amounts of data — to zero in on genetic markers that will help develop and drive new treatments.

A $3.5 million, four-year research award from the National Human Genome Research Institute will help that happen. Christopher Chute, M.D., Dr.P.H., chair of Mayo Clinic's Division of Biomedical Informatics, is principal investigator of the study, which involves investigators in cardiology, genetics and biomedical ethics.

"This award from the NIH is a vote of confidence in Mayo's leadership in biomedical informatics, operating at the interface of electronic record data and state-of-the-art genomic analyses," says Dr. Chute. "It is also a testament to the multidisciplinary talent that rapidly came together as a successfully funded team winning a highly competitive grant. This exemplifies Mayo's emergence as a world-class organization in the present era of translational research."

Dr. Chute and his colleagues will first develop processes to effectively search existing medical record databases for cases of myocardial infarction (heart attack) and peripheral arterial disease. With those cases and appropriate controls, they will then search for novel factors in genomic data to identify genetic variants associated with the risk of heart and artery problems. Knowledge of such variants would help in identifying those who would benefit from aggressive new treatments.

As part of the research will involve genomic information from individuals, Mayo bioethicists on the team will be developing new and refined consent procedures in cooperation with Mayo's Institutional Review Board, which oversees participant privacy and confidentiality in research. A combination of patient interviews, testing and community engagement will be part of the process developed under Mayo's Center for Translational Science Activities.

Co-investigators on the study are biostatistician Mariza de Andrade, Ph.D.; bioethicist Barbara Koenig, Ph.D.; vascular researcher Iftikhar Kullo, M.D.; cardiovascular epidemiologist Véronique Roger, M.D., M.P.H.; and genetic epidemiologist James Cerhan, M.D., Ph.D.

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