NIH awards $884K grant to ASU's Center for Law, Science & Innovation

The Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law has been awarded a three-year grant totaling nearly $900,000 by the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute.

The $884,780 federal grant is for research into liability in the delivery of personalized medicine, a project led by Gary Marchant, the ASU Lincoln Professor of Emerging Technologies, Law and Ethics at the College of Law, and Faculty Director of the College of Law’s Center for Law, Science & Innovation.

“Liability is likely to be an increasingly important driver of personalized medicine, but it can be a double-edged sword,” said Marchant. “Our goal in this project is to first understand the dynamics and likely trajectory of liability in the field of personalized medicine. We then will try to shape liability impacts to be a positive rather than detrimental influence on the deployment of personalized medicine technologies and knowledge.”

The project’s title is “Liability in the delivery of personalized medicine: driver, impediment, or both?” So-called “personalized medicine” involves the tailoring of pharmaceuticals and other treatments to an individual’s genetic profile.

“This practice of personalized medicine will have far-reaching implications for the practice of law,” said Douglas Sylvester, Dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU. “With the diligent work of Gary and others, the College of Law has been at the forefront of this transformation, and this grant from the NIH will allow us to make further strides in this critical area.”

Marchant has assembled a highly regarded team of collaborators on this project, including Doug Campos-Outcalt, the Associate Chair for the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Phoenix Campus, an expert on evidence-based genetic testing; Amalia Issa, the Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Public Health and the Director of the Program in Personalized Medicine and Targeted Therapeutics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, an expert on translating and integrating personalized medicine into health care delivery and health systems; and Rachel Lindor, the Center’s current Research Director and an attorney who is also completing her medical degree at the Mayo Medical School, who is also an expert on the law-medicine interaction in personalized medicine.

The Center for Law, Science & Innovation is the first and largest academic center focused on the intersection of law with science and technology. Its 26 faculty fellows work with students and research fellows to explore innovations in law and policy for a world of rapidly changing technologies, through leading-edge scholarship, education, and policy dialogue.

The College of Law launched the world’s first LL.M. degree program for lawyers that specifically focuses on legal aspects of genomics and biotechnology, and also is home to the nation’s first law school Program on Personalized Medicine Law and Policy.