Emory researchers are part of a $39.5 million project to revolutionize drug efficacy and safety

Nearly 700,000 emergency room visits each year are due to adverse drug interactions, as physicians and patients often must use trial and error to find the most effective drug, dosage, and/or drug combination for each individual patient.

A recently announced research project aims to make medicines safer and more effective by studying environmental, genetic and lifestyle factors that contribute to both drug effectiveness and negative interactions with other drugs.

Researchers from Emory University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University and the Mayo Clinic are collaborating on the project, called “IndiPHARM” (Individual Metabolome and Exposome Assessment for Pharmaceutical Optimization). The aim of the study is to improve the understanding of why drugs work differently in different patient groups.

“This project is an example of how cutting-edge technologies and scientific collaboration across institutions and sectors can advance human progress and reduce suffering. IndiPHARM promises nothing less than a revolution in pharmacology and patient care,” said Dr. Katrina Armstrong, interim president of Columbia University, the lead institution of the IndiPHARM project, in a press release.

IndiPHARM is funded with $39.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency created in 2022 to support research projects that have the potential to lead to breakthroughs in biomedicine and health. These are the largest resources ever dedicated to advancing the scientific measurement of the exposome – the total environmental exposures a person is exposed to in their lifetime and their biological response to those exposures – and applying them to personalized medicine.

“We hope to bring environmental measurement into the clinic so we can see how it affects our responses to different drug treatments and how it can potentially affect disease progression,” says Doug Walker, PhD, associate professor in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University. Rollins School of Public Health“This is a truly revolutionary project because it allows us to more comprehensively examine the stresses we face as humans and put those measurements into a framework that may give us actionable advice to protect human health.”

The special Emory University portion of the project is led by Walker and Xin Hu, PhD, also of the Gangarosa Division of Environmental Health at Rollins, and Dean Jones, PhD, and Young-Mi Go, PhD, of the Emory School of Medicine's Department of Medicine. Walker, Hu and Jones are also members of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University.

Last year, a project led by another team of researchers at Emory University became the first-ever recipient of APRA-H funding, receiving $24.8 million to develop a programmable approach to prevent, treat and potentially cure various diseases.

“This demonstrates that Emory faculty are at the cutting edge of science and advancing the possibilities of developing technologies to improve health,” Walker said.