The public Hospital La Paz of the Community of Madrid leads a research project in Spain, whose objective is improve the application of personalized medicine in the National Health System (SNS) to advance the efficacy and safety of medicines.
Personalized medicine, the use of which has increased significantly in recent years, seeks tailor treatment to individual genetic characteristics of each patient, allowing for superior drug selection and reduced side effects. This improvement in the management of resources and greater efficiency in the treatment of diseases is possible thanks to the use of pharmacogenetic biomarkerswhich are variations in genes that code for proteins involved in drug action, toxicity, or metabolism.
This collaborative initiative spearheaded by the La Paz public hospitalthrough its Clinical Pharmacology Service, is called iPharmgx and seeks to establish a platform that allows quickly evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of anticipated genotyping strategies of pharmacogenetic biomarkers in the National Health System. For this, it will develop a master protocol, in which successive adaptive clinical trials will be incorporated. This will make it possible to evaluate the use of biomarkers in certain patients who are going to receive a treatment and the genetic information may be decisive when it comes to predicting its efficacy or toxicity.
Eleven Spanish hospitals participate in the project
The iPharmgx project, coordinated from La Paz by Alberto Borobiamedical specialist in Clinical Pharmacology and associate professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, has one million euros of financing from the Carlos III Health Institute and the participation of more than 60 researchers from eleven hospitals throughout Spain. Notable among them are the public hospitals in Madrid, Gregorio Marañón and La Princesa, as well as the Gómez Ulla Central Defense Hospital, the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Health Technology Assessment Agency of the Carlos III Health Institute.
The group of researchers at Hospital La Paz is made up of specialists from the Clinical Pharmacology and Genetics services that are complemented by the clinical part in which specialists from the Nephrology and Hematology services and the section on infectious diseases of Internal Medicine are integrated. This project is an important step towards implementation of personalized medicine in Spain and it is expected to have a great impact on improving the health of the population.
Clinical Pharmacology and clinical trials unit
The Clinical Pharmacology Service of Hospital La Paz is directed by Antonio J. Carcas and made up of Elena Ramírez, Alberto Borobia, Irene García and Lucía Díaz, as well as resident doctors in the specialty and laboratory technicians. He is in charge of the Central Clinical Research and Clinical Trials Unit (Ucicec) also integrated into IdiPAZ, the Health Research Institute of Hospital La Paz.
The Ucicec is a research support platform to set up research support structures. He currently coordinates the Support Platform for Clinical Research, which brings together 34 units clinical research throughout Spain.
The activity of this unit has increased significantly in recent years, supporting almost 50 research groups of Hospital La Paz-IdiPAZ in the development of clinical trials, both academic and promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, and participating significantly in three projects with European funding dedicated to the fight once morest the current pandemic.
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