Heart Attack Prediction Tool Available for License

Four URMC researchers who received a U.S. patent for their innovative method of predicting the risk of recurrent heart attacks are eager to see their work brought to clinics, hospitals, and physicians’ offices around the world.

In 2015, the University of Rochester was granted a patent based on the work of James Corsetti, M.D., Ph.D., Charles Sparks, M.D., Daniel Ryan M.D., and Arthur Moss, M.D. The patent details a graphical exploratory data analysis tool called “outcome event mapping”, or OEM, as an approach for identifying subgroups of individuals at high or low risk for a medical outcome.

OEM has been applied to identify heart attack patients at increased risk for further heart attacks. In this example, the method graphically illustrates risk over levels of two biomarkers of heart health: HDL (“the good”) cholesterol, and C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation.

The graph at right delineates combinations of the two marker levels associated with high-risk patient subgroups (peaks) and low-risk patient subgroups (valleys). 

In this example, the OEM approach has been extended to treat genetic data with the figure presenting OEMs for two states of a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) that show a well-defined, high-risk subgroup for one of the SNP states and virtually no risk for the other SNP state. OEM can therefore be used to predict whether patients who have already suffered heart attacks are at higher risk for a repeat occurrence.

The team of researchers behind the patent has been collaborating since the late 1990s to come up with new approaches to identify high risk populations. They believe this method has the potential to help physicians improve personalized patient care. 

UR Ventures, the technology transfer operation at the University of Rochester, is actively seeking an industrial partner who can make this diagnostic tool available to healthcare providers.

To learn more about licensing OEM, contact Matan Rapoport at UR Ventures.

Bethany Bushen | 8/23/2016