Friday, August 8, 2008

Old BWH study helping Amgen find new targeted therapeutics

By Stephen DeSantis

A joint project between Amgen Inc. and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is nearing completion, having spent the last few years using genetic material from blood samples given by nearly 28,000 women for a study launched nearly 15 years ago.

The unique private-public collaboration called the Women’s Genome Health Study also involves the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Research data from the study, being headed by Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s, is being used by Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN) to establish new biomarkers and diagnostic tools and to help the biotech firm in developing targeted therapeutics, a harbinger of personalized medicine.

“This is already helping us in programs that are in early phases of the clinic, where they allow us to understand whether polymorphisms exist that could be affecting outcomes in disease progression,” said Scott Patterson, Amgen’s executive director of medical sciences.

The original project, then just called The Women’s Health Study, was a clinical trial started in 1992 for an entirely different purpose. It was initiated by Julie Buring, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s and now deputy director of its Division of Preventive Medicine.

The massive 10-year study set out to identify the long-term benefits for 40,000 middle-aged women taking low-dose aspirin and vitamin E. At the time it was speculated that aspirin and vitamin E could protect against heart disease, stroke and cancer. That study ultimately failed to find a correlation and was closed in 2002.

But the project was reborn and retooled in 2006 due to a great deal of forethought. The blood samples taken from the women were still in cold storage. For the researchers in the new study, this was a gold mine of new genetic data, matched to years of medical histories.

Amgen’s research facility in Cambridge, under the direction of principal scientist Alex Parker, has been decoding these samples to determine how genetic variation in women is connected to illnesses such as osteoporosis, breast cancer and heart disease. Parker said the project would not have been nearly as successful if it was not done locally. With the sheer size of the data being generated, it is often easier to simply deliver it over to Brigham and Women’s in person.

Parker’s team has completed genotyping about 90 percent of the women’s DNA and plans to complete the work in September.