BioPharma, Health Tech

Verily, Color partner on delivering genetic information for Project Baseline participants

Color vice president for research and scientific affairs Alicia Zhou explained that there is an ethical obligation to provide information on actionable genes, but costs and logistics have previously made doing so prohibitive.

Participants in a massive study that Alphabet’s life sciences division launched two years ago will be able to receive their genetic information under a partnership with a genomics company.

In a blog post Thursday, Color vice president for research and scientific affairs Alicia Zhou wrote of the partnership with Alphabet’s Verily to return actionable genetic information to participants in the Project Baseline Health Study. Under the partnership with Verily, participants will have access to clinical-grade, physician-ordered genomic services from Burlingame, California-based Color, along with board-certified genetic counselors and clinical pharmacists who can help them to better understand risks for hereditary cancers, heart disease and also genes that can affect their responses to medication therapies, Zhou wrote.

The project has recently brought in several corporate partners, including pharmaceutical companies like Novartis, Otsuka, Pfizer and Sanofi. That’s in addition to academic partnerships signed early on in the program, like Stanford University and Duke University. The four-year study was launched in 2017 with the goal of studying 10,000 volunteers.

Zhou noted in her post that many large cohort studies have not returned actionable results to participants. In a phone interview, she noted that this was because of logistical and other limitations, but the decision to do so for Project Baseline was made because it was the ethical thing to do.

“At the beginning, when these research cohorts were being put together, there were a lot of barriers to returning results,” she explained. “One is the cost – an additional cost the study would have to incur to return the results – and in the past it was potentially prohibitive to do that.”

But Color has built a system that makes delivering those results easier by taking the burden off of Verily to provide the associated services like getting consent and returning results through genetic counselors, Zhou said. There is also an ethical obligation, she added.

“If you know someone has BRCA1, which increases the risk of breast cancer, you should tell them that,” she said, referring to a gene. Drugs that treat BRCA mutation-associated cancers include AstraZeneca’s Lynparza (olaparib) and Clovis Oncology’s Rubraca (rucaparib).

In all, participants in the study will have have access to information on 60 actionable genes associated with increased risk of certain cancers like BRCA1 and MLH1, as well as those involved with risk of cardiovascular disease, like LDLR, which is associated with familial hypercholesterolemia.

Photo: REB Images, Getty Images

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