Duke Spinout MeTree, a Family Health IT Tool, Gets Nod from Biden Cancer Panel
A Duke University biotech spinout that has invented a family health history tool just got recognition from President Joe Biden’s Cancer Panel as a tool to optimize cancer screening.
This week, the panel released its report, “Closing Gaps in Cancer Screening: Connecting People, Communities, and Systems to Improve Equity and Access,” pressing for urgent action to improve equity and access as screening rates lag.
Among its calls is the need to build more-effective health IT tools to aid in clinical decisions, citing MeTree as a case study.
Developed by a team of researchers at the Duke Center for Applied Genomics & Precision Medicine (CAGPM), MeTree is a web-based, patient-facing tool to collect family health history and inform clinicians of important health-related information. It asks patients to enter information such as diet, exercise, smoking, and family history -- data that is often not present in electronic medical records or in standardized forms. It also provides support to patients and providers for hereditary cancer syndromes, thrombosis, coronary artery disease, aortic aneurysm, ischemic cerebrovascular disease, hereditary cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and hereditary liver diseases, among others.
“Exploring how to put together the different risk assessment and management components into a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline that adapts to each unique setting might finally bridge the access gap and start to extend healthcare advances related to prevention and maintaining health into community settings,” said Lori Orlando, M.D., MHS, professor of medicine and director of the precision medicine program in CAGPM, who is leading the team behind MeTree.
“To have it highlighted by the President’s Panel is beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”
In another Triangle angle to the story, renowned Durham businessman Bob Ingram is one of the three members of the President’s Cancer Panel recommending Duke’s MeTree platform. Ingram is a former member of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s board of directors and former CEO of GSK.
Launched in 2019, MeTree came out of the Genomic Medicine Model, a multi-institutional project that aimed to implement personalized medicine in primary care practices.
The success of that project led to funding as part of National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) IGNITE (Implementing Genomics in Clinical Practice) network.
“For the last 10 years my team has worked hard to try to find the best ways to leverage emerging healthcare data standards for interoperability to improve the process of risk assessment and shared decision-making between providers and patients,” Orlando said.
“It has been an intriguing and rewarding endeavor, which has really helped to shape our understanding of the needs, barriers, and potential solutions to scale this type of work. There is still much to be done and we hope to continue to help shape the path forward as our studies progress.”
Established in 2014, CAGPM focuses on developing strategies and capabilities to enhance its ability to diagnose and predict patient outcomes across the continuum from health to disease.
The North Carolina Precision Health Collaborative is a long-time supporter.
“CAGPM’s clinicians, researchers and collaborators have been involved in the Collaborative since Day 1,” said Sara Imhof, Ph.D., senior director of precision health with NCBiotech, who oversees the Collaborative.
Referring to MeTree, she said family health history is “foundational to precision health.”
“It’s a critical first source of data on individual variability that leads the way for prediction of disease or a personalized care plan. To bring digital health technology to family health history, and apply it to cancer prevention, is critical for precision health and disease prevention.”