The News Review:

- Genetic Testing May Be Valuable In Treating Colorectal Cancer
- Healthy grants for medical research
- Privacy matters: When is personal data truly de-identified?
- $20 million NIH grant to transform clinical research at UIC
- Vanderbilt wins $14M in health grants
- Domestic clinical trials market booms

Genetic Testing May Be Valuable In Treating Colorectal Cancer
Science Daily (press release)
"Pharmacogenetic testing is a relatively new treatment innovation that may prove to be a valuable tool for clinicians as they develop personalized treatments for cancer patients to minimize side effects while maintaining outcomes" says lead author Dr. Heather Taffet Gold assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy in the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College. "ur study points to significant potential benefits for pretreatment pharmacogenetic testing for metastatic colorectal cancer but remains to be verified by clinical research. The model assumed that under usual care patients received a full dose of irinotecan. With genetic testing irinotecan dosage was reduced 25 percent in individuals identified using the genetic test as having the UGT1A1*28 variant allele. The dose reduction is specified in the Food and Drug Administration–approved drug label to minimize cases of neutropenia.
Related from Talloonne: Workplace gene testing fears

Healthy grants for medical research
PS News
Six grants totalling almost $15 million and up to $2. 5 million each are to go to six new Centres for Clinical Research Excellence. NHMRC to fund studies The Centres are to specialise in sleep health with an emphasis on investigating the biology of sleep; major eye diseases; newborn medicine; oral health; and sexually transmitted and blood borne viral infections in Aboriginal Australians. The Centres are expected to study the brains and lungs of newborn babies; rehabilitation for aphasia (the loss of ability to communicate due for example to brain injury); and the prevention and treatment of oral diseases. Parliamentary Secretary for Health Mark Butler said the initiative would allow for high-quality clinical research to take place.

Privacy matters: When is personal data truly de-identified?
InfoWorld
It can use the dataset for research and development but the remaining data is still regarded as protected health information (PHI) subject to HIPAA. No other country has developed a more rigorous or detailed guidance for how to convert personal data covered by privacy regulations into non-personal data (see Table 2). Indeed clinical-research organizations rarely use the “safe harbor” and “limited data set” options because they must strip out so much information — particularly dates of service and discharge — that it makes the remaining data almost worthless from a clinical-research perspective. What’s the benefit to America of this obscure de-identification rule? It enables health care organizations that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to use patient data to convert it into a format they can use for a range of other purposes. These other purposes include improving the efficacy of drugs and medical devices and identifying the optimal places to build new health care facilities. Tags: security network monitoring and management privacy next ? 1234.

$20 million NIH grant to transform clinical research at UIC
Physrg.com
The grant is the largest in UIC’s history. “The CCTS draws upon the rich intellectual breadth of the UIC campus and adds to the portfolio of excellent research that is underway on the campus” said Paula Allen-Meares UIC chancellor. Translational research — moving new basic science knowledge into useful applications for health and medicine — is “an urgent need and a continuing challenge” says R. Michael Tanner UIC provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Vanderbilt wins $14M in health grants
Bizjournals.com
The school has won 49 grants so far accounting for more than half the NIH grants awarded in Tennessee says Susan Wente associate vice chancellor for research and senior associate dean for biomedical sciences at Vanderbilt. A $3 million award will go to expand an international clinical research fellowship program through the Vanderbilt University Institute for Global Health funding a year of clinical research training in the developing world for an additional 23 research fellows over the next 18 months and allowing 10 fellows to continue their projects for a second year. Another grant totaling $923000 over two years will allow Marylyn Ritchie director of the school’s Computational Genomics Core and an associate professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics to add a handful of new positions in her lab at the Medical Center and accelerate her research in helping find causes of diseases such as diabetes. The Medical Center is already using grant money to hire at least 50 new positions. Vanderbilt has submitted a total of 600 grant requests Wente says. The NIH stimulus grant pool is more than $10 billion and only a small percentage have been awarded.

Domestic clinical trials market booms
Hindu Business Line
India is turning out to be one of the hottest destinations for conducting global clinical research owing to a huge patient pool easy recruitment of patients and high cost savings. Thomas New Delhi July 25 The clinical trials market is booming. The number of clinical trials being conducted in India has doubled from 170 in 2006 to 350 at the end of 2008 according to the Central Drug Standard Control rganisation. And going by the indications in the first six months of 2009 the number of registered clinical trials in the country is likely to touch a new high.