May 3, 2012
Scientists at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the UNC School of Medicine have received a $2.4 million grant to study genetic variations in people with diabetes.
The goal of the study is to identify genetic variations that may help predict the response to various treatment options for type 2 diabetes to reduce cardiovascular disease. Michael Wagner, PhD, and John Buse, MD, are coprincipal investigators on the grant. Wagner is a research professor in the School’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and a member of the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. Buse is director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We hope this work will enable us to target interventions to patients most likely to benefit and least likely to be harmed,” Buse says. “The genes containing these variants may also prove to be novel targets for drug development, leading to new medicines for improving outcomes for diabetic patients in the future.”
The four-year grant was awarded by National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (Award Number R01HL110380). This project is one of several in the area of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine supported by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute, the academic home of NIH’s Clinical and Translational Science Award at UNC-Chapel Hill. The CTSA program aims to improve human health by transforming the research and training environment to enhance the efficiency and quality of clinical and translational research.
Co-investigators are Howard McLeod, PharmD, Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor of Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy and director of IPIT, and Alison Motsinger-Reif, PhD, assistant professor of statistics at North Carolina State University, adjunct professor in the School, and a member of IPIT.
This study is a follow-up to the ACCORD trial, which found no additional improvement in cardiovascular events in patients treated with intensive diabetes, blood pressure or lipid therapy.
“These failures of seemingly rational treatment approaches could be the result of differential response due to genetic variation,” Wagner says. “Our study is aimed at identifying the genetic variations that may be involved.”
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