Middletown’s Community Health Center patient research project earns White House grant

Article originally published in The Middletown Press

MIDDLETOWN >> The Community Health Center is one of several groups receiving awards to support the launch of President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program.

According to a release, the PMI program is a landmark research effort that aims to engage 1 million or more U.S. participants to improve the ability to prevent and treat disease.

Mark Masselli, CHC’s president, chief executive officer and founder, agrees with National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins about the importance of discerning the differences in treating patient illnesses.

“Our care for the underserved, who too often get left out of important medical research, led us to create the Weitzman Institute to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to be active participants in studies that can improve health outcomes,” he said in a release.

The CHC, based in Middletown and with locations around Connecticut, is part of a pilot program which assesses the framework needed to allow a variety of federally qualified health centers to take part in the program.

“This vital research program will help biomedical researchers and health-care providers develop targeted treatments to help Americans live healthier, longer lives,” according to a joint statement from U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, John Larson and Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro. “We look forward to the impact their work will have on the search for new treatments and cures.”

The Precision Medicine Initiative was launched by the White House last January to improve patient health and disease treatment. Under the program, the NIH will partner with six federally qualified health centers across the country, including the CHC, to collect a range of biological data — medical, genetic, environmental and those supplied by patients — to better understand disease and tailor treatments, the release continues.