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Scripps Translational Science Institute gets $34 million for digital, genomic health care

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The National Institutes of Health has awarded a grant of over $34 million to the Scripps Translational Science Institute to apply digital and genomic technologies to health care.

The five-year grant is the third Clinical and Translational Science Award the NIH has awarded to the institute, part of The Scripps Research Institute.

As part of its new grant, announced on Monday, the translational science institute has partnered with Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, which performs rapid genome sequencing for seriously ill infants. The institute, headed by Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, is part of Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego.

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“They are the pioneers in neonatal sequencing,” said Eric Topol, M.D., the translational institute’s director. STSI brings its own strengths, such as as understanding the genomics of infection, Topol said.

“Stephen Kingsmore and I have been friends for many years,” Topol said. “We have eight different programs we’re working on together.”

Topol said the work in infants complements STSI’s longstanding research into elderly people who don’t have serious chronic diseases. This “Wellderly” study examines the characteristics of the very healthy elderly, including their genomic makeup, to look for factors related to their health.

Rady Children’s expertise can now help the translational institute associate these factors with health and disease from birth to old age.

“This gives us the full lifespan, which we never really had,” Topol said.

The renewed grant also includes collaboration with another Scripps Research affiliate, Calibr, Topol said. Calibr has built up a database of thousands of already approved drugs, along with information about their mechanism of action. This could help infants with newly diagnosed genetic diseases.

“We could quickly diagnose a mutation and then repurpose a drug that was used in the past for other things,” he said.

Among other programs, STSI continues to refine its “molecular autopsy” initiative, Topol said. It seeks to establish the cause of death in cases where the cause cannot be firmly established.

Additionally, the institute is streamlining clinical testing in a field known as “digital clinical trials,” he said.

“Instead of having people go to a medical site, we can enroll them digitally and send them sensors and do the whole thing without ever having to have come for a physical visit,” Topol said. “We now have the leading and first pregnancy research app. It has gone to tens of thousands of pregnant women, and we hope eventually there’ll be millions each year.”

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