UWSOP Professor and Associate Director David Veenstra, along with Vanderbilt University Professor Josh Peterson, and Geisinger Health Assistant Professor Jing Hao, have been awarded a 5-year, $4.5M grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to evaluate the clinical and economic outcomes of screening for cancer and cardiovascular disease risk using Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS).
PRS’s are an exciting approach in genomic medicine that utilize information from hundreds to thousands of genetic variants in a person’s genome to predict their risk of future disease. This project, the Rational Integration of PRS (RIPS), will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of using PRS to conduct population-level screening for breast cancer, colon cancer, and coronary heart disease. The investigators will also identify optimal PRS risk thresholds across diverse populations.
Dr. Veenstra will be joined by The CHOICE Institute’s senior research scientist Greg Guzauskas, and PhD candidate Joyce Jiang.