For the past 20 years, the Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety (CPNDS) has been working to identify why patients have different responses to drug treatments. As part of a recent $200 million Genome Canada initiative, Dr. Bruce Carleton will be leading a new $17 million project to expand on the work of the CPNDS to make medications safer for children across Canada. By uncovering the genetic variations in patients that can lead to adverse drug reactions, this research could help explain these differing medication responses and improve disease outcomes.
“The human genome is a window into the biology of why we suffer side effects from drugs or experience diseases differently,” says Dr. Bruce Carleton, founder and lead of CPNDS and senior clinician scientist at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. “Some people have traits encoded in their genes that make them more naturally protected from side effects of medications and diseases, while others may have traits that increase their risk of side effects. This project will help identify these traits and enable clinicians to test for them so that all children will have access to safer treatments and earlier diagnoses.”
Dr. Carleton is also the director of the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Programme at BC Children’s Hospital, Division Head, Translational Therapeutics, Department of Pediatrics, at the University of British Columbia, and a founder of the MedSafe Clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital.
Over the past two decades, the CPNDS has collected biological samples from more than 12,350 patients along with demographic and clinical data from more than 100,000 uses of medication and more than 10,000 severe adverse drug reactions.
This type of data is especially critical for rare diseases like childhood cancers.
– Dr. Bruce Carleton
“This type of data is especially critical for rare diseases like childhood cancers. Building upon data like this has helped raise a child’s chance of surviving cancer from 30 per cent in the 1960s to over 83 per cent in BC today. This nationwide project will not only help us determine the most effective treatment plan for each child, but also improve existing care and help reduce some of the life-long side effects.”
Some of the patients in this database have more than 40 years of longitudinal data and were recruited and enrolled from 14 academic health centres across eight provinces in Canada (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland).
Using this valuable resource, the project aims to:
- Re-consent previously enrolled CPNDS patients for inclusion in the Pan-Canadian Genomics Library (PCGL) and recruit new patients at the 10 existing study sites over four years to build a richer, more diverse clinical and genomic database for future research.
- Enhance the genomic data with advanced whole-genome sequencing to enable deeper investigations into drug-induced harm.
- Identify biological markers that may be able to predict the severity of drug-induced harm experienced by pediatric oncology patients.
This work will be made widely accessible to facilitate research and innovation to improve drug safety and effectiveness in children for a wide range of diseases and treatments.
The project is supported by Genome Canada and Genome BC for a combined total of $12.5 million, with another $2 million from the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation.
Genome Alberta, Ontario Genomics, Génome Québec, Michael Smith Health Research BC, PacBio, and BC Platforms are also contributing to the project.
“Thanks to the generous funding from charitable organizations such as BC Children’s Hospital Foundation as well as other organizations across Canada’s genomics ecosystem, we have an incredible opportunity to improve care and ensure children are receiving the right drugs for them,” says Dr. Carleton.
