Patients and healthcare staff alike can thus open up completely new perspectives for themselves. The patient makes his/her data available. Data from clinical studies is readily available. An algorithm brings both data sets together and uses them to calculate whether the patient is eligible to take part in a study and which study. Patients and doctors can benefit from research and science almost immediately. The informed patient and their doctor thus make a decision together on which therapy path should be taken, where applicable. Research is brought to patients very quickly, and the roll-out of this technology ensures that it is implemented as widely as possible: “We wanted this to be applied with as wide a scope as possible”, Böttinger said. It doesn’t matter whether the healthcare entity is a regional group of care facilities, university clinics or private facilities. The main factor in making it a success is having regional partners from the various areas that want to develop solutions together. The organization of the German healthcare system poses challenges to all stakeholders here. This is because transferring data between sectors is difficult in this country, and this has not changed - and it also makes it difficult to trace a patient’s progress and history, or even to present it properly.

Encouraging experiences in the U.S.
However, the U.S. experience in this sector is encouraging. Böttinger was able to put medical research into practice at the renowned Mount Sinai Health System in New York: “We’ve got a trans-national program for implementing pharmacogenomics there”. Böttinger set up a team to deal with Clopidogrel, for example. This anticoagulant (thrombocyte aggregation inhibitor) is frequently used after coronary angioplasties, among other illnesses. In this group of patients, around a quarter are resistant to Clopidogrel. This means that these patients cannot benefit from this treatment and thus their risk of an infarction, a stroke and other illnesses remains high. This resistance is determined by genes and can be detected using genetic data.



The patient can only benefit from this technology if their genomic data are available and are used, however. The software for this was created at Mount Sinai, and it will initially mainly be used to support doctors in finding therapies. If the doctor prescribes Clopidogrel and enters this into the patient’s electronic file, then the program checks whether this patient had genetic tests done on them which are available in real time. If this analysis shows that the patient is Clopidogrel-resistant, then this information is displayed on the doctor’s screen. The software then suggests an alternative medication.

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