Milestone reached for precision medicine

On November 4, 2019, Johnese Spisso, MPA, President of UCLA Health and CEO of the UCLA Hospital System, and Richard Azar, Chief Operating Officer of UCLA Health, announced that UCLA recently reached a milestone in the effort to create California's largest genomic resource for precision medicine—consenting more than 50,000 patients across the UCLA health system.

UCLA Health strives to be a leader in precision medicine, an approach that takes into account individual differences in genes, environments and lifestyles to develop treatment and prevention strategies that have the greatest chances of success. In defining this goal, UCLA established an Institute for Precision Health in 2016 to help create a roadmap to personalized health care.

One of UCLA's signature efforts is the ATLAS program, using an electronic video consent to ask patients their individual preferences about the use of their clinical specimens for research. It is UCLA's goal to collect specimens and data from over 150,000 individuals over the next three years thereby creating one of the largest repositories for precision medicine in California and across the nation.

The ATLAS program is supported in part by the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Image source: UCLA Institute for Precision Health

Image caption: ATLAS data resides in a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based instance of our Azure cloud and is available to qualified researchers at UCLA.