Dr. Philip Empey
Translating an understanding of pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenomics into improved medication outcomes.
Projects
Precision medicine and genomics clinical implementation
Our Pittsburgh Pharmacogenomics (PittPGx) team leads pharmacogenomics (PGx) initiatives at UPMC, one of the nation’s largest health systems. Through the PreCISE-Rx (Pharmacogenomics-guided Care to Improve the Safety and Effectiveness of Medications), we have shown that PGx implementation is feasible by genotyping >5,000 patients since 2015 using standard of care testing and pharmacist-led clinical services .
Our team also develops clinical decision support and patient education in the electronic health record to optimize prescribing through gold standard resources and emerging AI-solutions.
Pharmacokinetics during critical illness
Pharmacokinetic changes during critical illness can significantly impact medication outcomes.
Our NIH-funded research includes studying whether altered sedative pharmacokinetics predicts of delirium in critically ill children (R01HD099284), how therapeutic hypothermia impacts drug pharmacokinetics, and understanding the role of drug transporters following traumatic brain injury (R01NS069247).
Pragmatic clinical trials to advance genomics
We’re studying the impact of genomics implementation in clinical workflows on real world outcomes to understand clinical utility.
Our MyPGx prospective randomized clinical trial (NCT06660264) is evaluating whether preemptive pharmacogenomic testing with pharmacist services will improve medication outcomes in a large employee health program. Our COMPASS-PGx study is similarly evaluating whether PGx testing and novel community pharmacy-based care will improve medication outcomes in patients with depression.
As a partner in the NHGRI IGNITE network, we recruited for GUARDD-US (NCT04191824) to determine whether participant and provider knowledge of a positive APOL1 status and accompanying guideline based clinical decision support (CDS) on blood pressure management change in systolic blood pressure (SBP) from baseline to 3 months.
Leveraging large biobanks to accelerate PGx discovery
Our research using large biobanks aims to understand genomic variation and associations with medication response.
With the All of Us research program, we’ve haplotyped >250,000 participants to determine the frequency of variation, examined long read sequencing data to understand complex structural variation, and evaluated potential genotype-phenotype associations in electronic health record data.
Locally, our PGx Center of Excellence takes a population approach through an exciting partnership with Pitt+Me Discovery, the University of Pittsburgh’s DNA biorepository. Genotyping for PGx variation and linkage to high resolution EHR data is enabling discovery not possible with external data sets.
Innovations in genomics education
Our team has developed the pharmacist genomics competency standards and are innovators in high fidelity educational approaches to overcome well known gaps in genomics knowledge. Through Test2LearnTM, we pioneered using real genetic data as an effective strategy to train emerging health professionals as well as practicing clinicians seeking to expand their skills through online and live education.
Expert faculty have trained >5,500 healthcare professionals to integrate PGx testing in their practice and are currently contracted by the Department of Veterans Affairs to train pharmacists nationally.
