CLIPMERGE Projects

Personalized Drug Treatments - Pharmacogenomics

Today, patients at Mount Sinai can already benefit from personalized medicine. For example, with the CLIPMERGE Pharmacogenetics project, BioMe participants undergoing routine care at Mount Sinai Medical Center consent to test their DNA for differences in genes that may suggest greater risk of side effects or chance of increased benefit from certain medications. These results will be made available to the patient's treating physician at the time they are prescribing certain medications for participating patients.

CLIPMERGE Renal Care – Personalized kidney disease management

Compared to European Americans, African Americans are four to five times more likely to develop kidney failure. Family members of African Americans with kidney failure are also more likely to develop kidney failure, suggesting that genetic factors may contribute to and change kidney disease risk between races. Recent studies show that different forms of a gene called APOL1 helps to explain why some African Americans are likely to develop certain forms of kidney disease. We examined these APOL1 risk variants in 15,000 of our BioMe participants, including 5,000 with African ancestry. The results of APOL1 variant testing for our Mount Sinai BioMe participants showed that our African American patients with high blood pressure who inherited two copies of the APOL1 variants are four times more likely to have kidney disease compared to those with one or no APOL1 variant copy. These results are compelling enough to examine how APOL1 genetic testing may be used in early screening to determine people's risk for kidney failure. If genetic risk is detected early an appropriate treatment could potentially safeguard against kidney failure.

Learn more about how you can participate in CLIPMERGE Projects