The Center for Integrated Diagnostics (CID) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is collaborating with InterSystems, a leader in software for connected healthcare, to help accelerate innovations in molecularly targeted medicine.
MGH CID is exploring how the InterSystems HealthShare health informatics platform can support genomic research and clinical innovations. HealthShare enables interoperability across multiple systems and data formats, making it possible to capture, share, understand, and act on large volumes of structured and unstructured health information. The platform is used by private hospitals and health systems, regional and statewide health information exchanges, and entire nations.
The CID research is specifically leveraging HealthShare to target large data set management and cross-organizational collaboration, to allow integration of genetic and clinical data to improve clinical decision support and to enhance genomic knowledge discovery. The CID genetically fingerprints patient tumors across the complete spectrum of disease sites to guide targeted therapies, thereby enhancing the efficacy of drug treatments and supporting new clinical trial designs. Patients whose cancers harbor susceptible genotypes can be offered the most appropriate clinical treatment.
The CID laboratory pursues retrospective and corollary research studies to support the expansion of its genotyping profiles. To accomplish these goals, the lab utilizes a number of molecular and cellular techniques, including fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), qPCR, DNA sequencing, SNP-based approaches and DNA sizing analyses. The combination of these approaches allows for the detection of somatic genetic aberrations on multiple levels, including gene copy number, point mutations and small deletions and insertions.
Learn more on the Center for Integrated Diagnostics website
