MyCode Community Health Initiative hits another milestone; 150,000 signed up to largest health system sequencing project
DANVILLE, Pa. – Geisinger announced today it has reached 150,000 participants in its major biobank and DNA sequencing study known as the MyCode Community Health Initiative.
“This is an important milestone for us and it’s only the beginning,” said David H. Ledbetter, Ph.D., Geisinger executive vice president and chief scientific officer. “Each and every new participant allows us to perform research that will help us find new ways to anticipate or identify sometimes life-threatening medical conditions early and greatly improve health outcomes.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, nearly 2 million people in the United States are at increased risk for adverse health outcomes because they have genetic mutations which predispose them to one of just three conditions: breast and ovarian cancers, Lynch syndrome cancers and hereditary high cholesterol.
These are three key conditions among the total of 27 conditions or diseases that Geisinger is informing MyCode participants about as a result of the nation’s largest genomic sequencing study.
Launched in January 2014 in collaboration with the Regeneron Genetics Center, the population genomics program originally set out to recruit 100,000 new study participants over five years. That target has been rapidly surpassed and the goal reset to 250,000.
In the past year, MyCode has increased enrollment and expanded its reach from Pennsylvania into Geisinger-affiliated hospitals in New Jersey where, in only 8 months of operation, over 8,000 participants have already signed up.
“For me, population health is taking better care of our patients. But it also means anticipating their medical needs when we can,” said Geisinger President and CEO David T. Feinberg, M.D.
“We're one of the only organizations taking a population approach to genomics with our MyCode Community Health Initiative. To me, what we’re doing is really anticipatory medicine. It's coming up with medically actionable genomic results and giving that information back to our patients. And no one else is doing that on this scale.”
The growing database of information coming out of the MyCode precision health project represents a boon to current and future research but it is also providing Geisinger patients with personalized health care information that is impacting lives and changing health outcomes.
Geisinger patients who participated in the program have had cancers detected earlier than they might otherwise have been and heart disease identified before any clinical symptoms were present.
Families are discovering possible explanations for medical events in their family histories and learning to take earlier pro-active measures for themselves and for their children.
On the research side, just in the past six months alone important scientific studies resulting from work on MyCode data have been published in major national journals, including Science and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
One recent NEJM study found people with certain mutations in a gene associated with cholesterol levels are up to 41 percent less likely to get coronary artery disease, leading to the potential for life-saving new drugs that mimic the effect of the mutations.
Click for more information or to follow MyCode progress.
About Geisinger
Geisinger is among the nation’s leading providers of value-based care, serving 1.2 million people in urban and rural communities across Pennsylvania. Founded in 1915 by philanthropist Abigail Geisinger, the non-profit system generates $10 billion in annual revenues across 134 care sites - including 10 hospital campuses, and Geisinger Health Plan, with 600,000 members in commercial and government plans. The Geisinger College of Health Sciences educates more than 5,000 medical professionals annually and conducts more than 1,400 clinical research studies. With 26,000 employees, including 1,600 employed physicians, Geisinger is among Pennsylvania’s largest employers with an estimated economic impact of $14 billion to the state’s economy. On March 31, 2024, Geisinger became the first member of Risant Health, a new nonprofit charitable organization created to expand and accelerate value-based care across the country. Learn more at geisinger.org or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X.
