Personalized medicine offers the opportunity to transform healthcare by improving health outcomes and has the potential to make healthcare more cost-effective.

This new era of healthcare has brought about significant changes in the drug discovery process – moving from a focus on discovering blockbuster drugs to creating targeted therapies, companion diagnostics and biomarkers. (See BioWorld Insight, Sept. 4, 2012.)

Its potential to help relieve the burden on escalating healthcare costs has not been lost on policy makers. Canada, for example, has already invested more than C$1 billion since 2006 to support genomics research and in late March announced in its budget a further C$165 million in new funding for Genome Canada, which invests in and manages large-scale genomics research.

Last year the government also announced funding specifically targeting personalized health. Researchers were invited to compete for C$71 million of funding from the 2012 Large-Scale Applied Research Project Competition in Genomics and Personalized Health, a partnership between Genome Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Cancer Stem Cell Consortium.

The results of this competition have just been released and 17 projects in total have been approved for funding, each valued in the range of C$3 million to C$13 million. Matching contributions from partners in individual projects will bring the total investment to C$150 million.

The funded projects will focus on the application of genomics to tailor patient treatments and therapies in fields as diverse as epilepsy, autism, HIV/AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular disease, rare neurological diseases and stroke.

Among these includes a project that will involve the translation of genetic discoveries into a personalized approach to treating inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). With more than 230,000 cases, Canada has among the highest frequency of people in the world with IBD, including Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. While there are a several drugs available on the market to treat IBDs, currently physicians are unable to predict which drug would be most effective for a given patient.

The IBD Genomic Medicine Consortium led by John Rioux and Alain Bitton of the Montreal Heart Institute will develop tests to help doctors match the right drug with the right patient. This will prevent patients from receiving ineffective and often expensive medication and improve the quality of patient life.

To overcome the potential problems with transplantation of bone marrow cells from a healthy donor to treat hematologic cancer such as rejection by the patient and graft versus host disease (GVHD) researchers Claude Perreault, Denis-Claude Roy and their team at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, of Montreal, Quebec, are developing a genetic test that will predict GVHD. Their ultimate goal is that the test will lead to safer use of bone marrow transplants. This will also improve immunotherapy by targeting the right immune cells to the right tumor cells, leading to more effective treatment.

"What's exciting about these projects is that each one holds enormous potential for breakthroughs where there is a serious clinical need," said Pierre Meulien, president and CEO of Genome Canada. "Personalized health is about tailoring treatment and medicines to the individual patient based on their unique genetic makeup and this is only possible through advances in genomics research."