Prof. Susan M. Wolf Awarded NIH Grant for Project to Establish the Legal Framework for Genomic Medicine
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded the first-ever grant dedicated to laying the policy groundwork needed to translate genomic medicine into clinical application. Professor Susan M. Wolf, who holds faculty appointments at the Law School and the University of Minnesota Medical School, is one of three eminent researchers who will lead the three-year, $2 million project, known as LawSeqSM. The project will convene legal, ethics, and scientific experts from across the country to analyze the current state of genomic law and create much-needed guidance on what it should be.
NIH has declared the adoption of genomic medicine by clinicians to be a top priority to improve both individual and public health. The federal Precision Medicine Initiative, announced by President Obama and currently being launched, aims to use genomics and other analyses to accelerate development of more powerful and tailored treatments for cancer and other diseases. Yet federal and state genomics law is unclear and poorly understood, presenting a major obstacle to progress. LawSeqSM. aims to advance the nation’s statutory and regulatory frameworks by clarifying current law, addressing gaps, and generating the forward-looking recommendations needed to create the legal foundation for the successful, widespread use of genomics in clinical care.
Wolf is an expert on law, medicine, and public policy who, over the past decade, has led a succession of NIH-funded projects generating recommendations on return of research results and incidental findings in genomics. In addition to her faculty posts—McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy; Faegre Baker Daniels Professor of Law; and Professor of Medicine—she is Chair of the University-wide Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. The other two principal investigators on LawSeqSM are Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD, of Vanderbilt University, an authority on the ethical, legal, and policy questions raised by genomics, and Frances Lawrenz, PhD, Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in qualitative and quantitative research methods. A group of 22 leading experts from academia, industry, and clinical care will collaborate on the project as well. LawSeqSM is supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) at NIH under award number 1R01HG008605 (Wolf, Clayton, Lawrenz, PIs).
