Healthiomics - Translational Programs
Digital Medicine
Wearable devices, such as Fitbit®, are primarily used to track a person’s heart rate and activity such as number of steps among other data variables such as calories, elevation, etc. Although the data generated by the wearable devices are useful in monitoring the person’s health and providing recommendations for change in daily habits to improve health, the wearable device data also have their application in the clinical side. For this project we utilize the data from the wearable device wherein the patient has a disease condition with clinical intervention. The data from the clinic is then correlated with data from the wearable device.
Immune Monitoring
While our understanding of the biological basis of brain tumor development has improved, and newer treatment modalities have been developed, survival for many types of malignant primary brain tumors has not improved significantly. Malignant glioma is the most common and aggressive primary brain cancer in adults. It is a deadly disease and remains so despite many novel therapies. Some of these therapies are in the clinic while some are currently in different stages of clinical testing. It is important to bring to the clinic newer treatments that can improve the survival and quality of life of patients with glioma.
Registration Process
Please follow the registration instructions for both programs. Digital Medicine program is open to everyone. For neoantigen vaccine program, please discuss the next steps with our team.
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Complete registration to enroll in Digital Medicine study
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Complete registration to submit patient records using xCures platform
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If you already have a Fitbit or after receiving Fitbit from CureScience, complete enrollment at Cure.Science
Please email info@curescience.org or call (612) 205 1555 for any questions
Wearables for Personalized Medicine
Introduction
Digital Medicine broadly encompasses generating useful information from the data acquired through digital means. This includes data from IoT sensors such as wearables (Fitbit, Apple Watch etc.). Sensors can be tailored to capture numerous vital parameters within the domain of health, mobility and lifestyle. such a real-time data can provide crucial health-related insights and may help deliver better care.
Wearable technology comes with the promise of improving one’s lifestyle. They use interactive user-interface and various sensors for tracking activity, recommending and motivating users to attain their fitness goals, potentially generating a change in daily or routine habits. The granularity and continuity of wearable data makes it a compelling source to identify clinical relevance. Changes in physiological data due to infections or diseases can be effectively detected, often even before the onset of symptoms. To computationally detect such abnormalities, we can either rely on statistical methods or on machine learning and deep learning models. Each individual has a different ‘normal’; for an athlete, a low heart rate and higher steps activity would prevail, older people might have the exact opposite as their normal. These differences lead to the requirement for personalization. Engaging artificial intelligence and machine learning models can lead to granular personalized health insights.
We are focused on elucidating and connecting information from wearables to the clinical outcomes. This can only be possible by connecting patients medical information to the data stream from the wearables. Patients enrolled in this study will be asked to wear a Fitbit device for specific duration. In cases where patients do not have Fitbit, CureScience can provide the wearable.
Contacts:
Patient associate: Amanda Wilburn – awilburn@curescience.org
Principal investigator: Dr. Pawan Patro – ppatro@curescience.org
Neoantigen Vaccine Against Glioma - A personalized Approach
While our understanding of the biological basis of brain tumor development has improved, and newer treatment modalities have been developed, survival for many types of malignant primary brain tumors has not improved significantly. Malignant glioma is the most common and aggressive primary brain cancer in adults. It is a deadly disease and remains so despite many novel therapies. Some of these therapies are in the clinic while some are currently in different stages of clinical testing. It is important to bring to the clinic newer treatments that can improve the survival and quality of life of patients with glioma. At CureScience™ Institute, we focus on developing more effective therapies against glioma.
Malignant gliomas can suppress the immune system and prevent cells of the immune system from attacking the tumor in the body. Suppression of the body’s natural immune response leads to aggressive and unchecked tumor growth. To improve the survival of patients with these tumors, it is important to allow the body’s immune system to mount a strong response against glioma. This, coupled with the newer drugs (alone, in combination, and multiple therapies) that kill the tumor cells, may improve patient survivals. Currently there is no immunotherapy for malignant gliomas that is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (US FDA). However, cancer peptide vaccines are a promising cancer immunotherapy that can induce cancer-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) in tumors. The peptides are designed based on tumor biomarkers or mutations to bind to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I and MHC class II. The promising results from two most recent phase I clinical trials published in Nature(1) (2) show that personalized peptide vaccination to newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients generates tumor-reactive T cells which can infiltrate glioblastomas and make tumor cells to be potentially susceptible to further immunotherapy approaches. Development of a universal neoantigen vaccine for one or more common types of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) phenotype could potentially treat a number of patients with more malignant gliomas.
In addition, just as each individual has a unique immunogenic profile, each tumor is unique in its immunogenicity. Thus another approach we are considering is to tailor an immunotherapeutic that is specific not only for an individual but also for the tumor. To this end, we are testing a vaccine against neoantigen peptides that are present on tumors but not normal tissue. This neoantigen peptide vaccine holds promise against malignant gliomas. In combination with other targeted therapies and immunotherapeutic agents, this vaccine will likely significantly improve survival of patients with malignant gliomas.
Contacts:
Patient associate: Amanda Wilburn – awilburn@curescience.org
Principal investigator: Dr. Feng Lin – flin@curescience.org