UW Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children's, all based in Seattle, will use a $50 million gift to establish the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine in Seattle. The gift comes from the late Jeffrey Brotman, and his wife Susan, as well as Pam and Dan Baty.
The Brotman Baty Institute will create a network of research labs across the three founding institutions. Jay Shendure, MD, PhD, a UW professor of genome sciences and an investigator at the Seattle-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, will direct the institute.
The institute's researchers will focus on improving patient outcomes via precision medicine. One of the first projects at the institute will be to catalog the roughly 60,000 estimated possible mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and help identify the mutations that are most likely to cause breast cancer.
"A typical patient doesn't really exist, yet for more than a century, medicine has been focused on diagnosing and treating typical patients," said Dr. Shendure. "Precision medicine aims to use an individual patient's unique genetic code to more effectively diagnose and individually treat that person. Through both basic science and the translation of new advances to the clinic, the institute will accelerate this process."