FARMINGTON

Dr. Frank Torti, the University of Connecticut Health Center's new vice president of health affairs, says that personalized medicine could be the next big thing in health care and that he expects the university to play a major role in it.

With UConn's work in genomics and the upcoming arrival of genetic research company Jackson Laboratory to campus, Torti said the health center is well-positioned to advance the field of personalized medicine, in which a patient's genetic information is used to customize treatment for a particular condition.

"Where we want UConn to lead is where we can actually begin to identify for individual patients drugs that are likely to work for them and be able to identify drugs that are likely to produce toxicity," Torti said, sitting in his new, sparsely furnished office. "If we can do that, we would change the face of how medicine is delivered. If we can do that, people will laugh at 20th-century and early 21st-century medicine the way that we now laugh at some of the things that were done in the 19th century, because we will have changed the way that we conceptualize how to treat a patient for a disease."

Now four weeks into his new position, Torti recently outlined his goals for the next few years.

"We want to find those areas, those intersections where science is going nationally and worldwide that's one part of the question," he said. "The other part of it is where does UConn currently, or could, have a unique contribution to that?"

Developing science is only half the battle. Actually getting it to the public is the other half. Negotiating the maze of the drug approval process is a matter that requires its own expertise, he said, and his earlier work as chief scientist and acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should help significantly in that respect.

"I have seen many good compounds, many good potential drugs never reach patients not because they weren't effective, but because the [developer] did not understand the pathway to get that drug approved," he said. "This is a science in its own right. This is a science that I bring to UConn."

UConn President Susan Herbst said that Torti's FDA experience was one reason she wanted to bring him to the health center.

"Drug discovery is a critical part of what we're going for," she said. "With our investment in genomics and in stem cell research, we need the expertise of someone who understands the drug approval process. To have someone who led the FDA, that's special and unusual for a university."

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New UConn Health Center Chief Looks Ahead

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