Jeremy M. Berg, director of UPMCs new Institute for Personalized Medicine holds a model that he built of a protein that is mutated in human disease. Jasmine Goldband | Tribune-Review

Published: Saturday, January 26, 2013, 9:00p.m. Updated 14 hours ago

Drugs like Plavix, which prevents blood clots in people with coronary artery and vascular diseases, benefit millions of people.

But some people who take them find they dont work.

About 15 percent of people who take Plavix dont activate it properly. There are lots of people who are taking it who are not benefiting from it at all, said Jeremy Berg, a UPMC specialist in personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine tailors treatment to individuals based on increasingly accessible genetic information. The data are used, for example, to predict a patients likelihood of developing types of cancer, determine which therapies or drugs will work for diseases like asthma or even how to treat a particular case of influenza.

Berg, a bio-organic chemist with a doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University, is the first director of UPMCs new Institute for Personalized Medicine, announced this month.

The goal of setting up the institute, and others like it, is to make personalized medicine real. It improves the chances of getting better therapies and treatments to the public, Berg said.

Research being done into genetically informed treatments and therapies has been going on for years. UPMCs is the second personalized medicine institute to open in the state in the past 12 months, the other being the Hershey Institute for Personalized Medicine, operated by Penn State that opened in February.

Institutes such as these get treatments from research labs to patients, doctors and scientists said.

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Institute for Personalized Medicine established by UPMC