Connecticut has committed roughly $500 million to bioscience under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, incentivizing Jackson Lab to come to Farmington and setting up a $200 million research fund that has benefited UConn and Yale scientists.
Now, industry leaders are hopeful the state is willing to take the next steps to better position itself for potential economic gains they say will soon flow from advances in “precision” or “personalized” therapeutics tailored to a given patient’s genetic makeup.
Members of the Connecticut Health Data Collaborative (CHDC), created by the legislature last year, recently told a joint meeting of the Commerce Committee and Commission on Economic Competitiveness that Yale, UConn and Jax are already planning to partner on an effort to collect, catalog, study and store thousands of patient DNA samples to be sequenced in Yale’s state-of-the-art machinery.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made millions of dollars available for such efforts, and Yale — which hopes a collaborative approach would be more competitive and also yield a larger pool of high-quality patient samples — has said it plans to apply for NIH funds this fall.
Prodded during a Friday meeting by the Business Council of Fairfield County’s Joseph McGee about potential economic benefits, Yale medical dean Dr. Robert Alpern said precision medicine is sure to be an increasingly competitive industry, but he said he believes Connecticut can be a top-five state.
“We’re going all in,” Alpern said of Yale’s investment in new sequencing equipment.
Alpern sat next to his UConn counterpart, Dr. Bruce Liang, who said precision medicine would bring “important scientific and economic benefits to the state.”
Liang noted that UConn already has data sets containing thousands of DNA samples for patients prone to alcoholism and colorectal cancer.
The Connecticut Health Data Collaborative envisions the “Connecticut Center for Genomic Medicine,” which would house the biobank, as a vehicle for spurring innovations that could improve health and potentially lower healthcare costs. The center would seek to leverage the state’s research, insurance and tech sectors.
Among the various tasks recommended by Data Collaborative for the center:
- Pursuing research awards from the state’s $200 million Bioscience Innovation Fund and other sources;
- Coordinating the collection and use of genetic data — which require a patient’s consent — and creating standards for ensuring data quality across facilities; and
- Building public-private partnerships and workforce development programs with area universities.
A CHDC report presented Feb. 3 noted similar genomic partnerships in Massachusetts and New York and recommended that Connecticut prioritize life sciences and precision medicine in its newly created “innovation districts” program.
State employees could also participate in genetic-testing pilot programs that would aim to identify those with predisposition to certain diseases, the report said.
In addition, CHDC said an expansion of the state’s prescription-monitoring program to include all prescriptions would help provide researchers with higher-quality data.
