By Allison Proffitt
January 16, 2018 | Less than three years after leaving the Medical College of Wisconsin for the HudsonAlpha Institute in Huntsville, Alabama, Howard Jacob is headed to colder climes. Jacob started today as the Vice President of the Genomic Research Center at AbbVie.
He wasn’t seeking a move, Jacob told Diagnostics World last week, but when a recruiter called the timing aligned on both personal and professional fronts.
“We’ve built a really amazing genomic medicine program. We’ve got a clinic that’s seeing patients. We’ve got a clinical laboratory that’s returning reports to physicians… but the challenge with genomic medicine right now is getting it reimbursed. It’s a major battle,” Jacob said. “How do we cover all this? How do we get this to scale? That’s been a frustration of mine. How do we move this beyond our small footprint here in Northern Alabama?... 92% of all healthcare in Alabama is Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, and they are not a big fan of genomics.”
Jacob is moving to Abbot Park in Chicago, less than ten miles from family, and into a completely new research environment. “It’s a completely different job, in that I now have about a million genomes to play with. And it’s at a scale that [I think we can do some really cool things with.]
Last year at this time, AbbVie, Genomics Medicine Ireland, and WuXi NextCODE announced an alliance to sequence 45,000 genomes from volunteer participants across Ireland. The collaboration focuses on major chronic diseases within oncology, neuroscience and immunology that affect hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and hundreds of millions worldwide.
And much more recently, the company joined Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ pre-competitive consortium with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Biogen, and Pfizer to sequence the exomes of all 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank.
“I now have about a million genomes to play with. And it’s at a scale that [I think we can do some really cool things with,]” he said.
Clinical Shift
In 2009, Jacob had earned renown for his treatment of Nicholas Volker, an incredibly sick Wisconsin boy with an unknown bowl disorder. Jacob and his team—including bioinformatician Liz Worthey—sequenced Nic’s exome, built a pipeline to review variants, and identified the one causing Nic’s illness: a mutation in XIAP. Nic was treated with a bone marrow transplant, and is doing well today.
Not long after Nic’s case, in March 2015, Jacob and several members of his team left the Medical College of Wisconsin to set up shop at HudsonAlpha. Jacob was committed to the clinic. He arrived in Huntsville in April, and the Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine opened on November 20, 2015 under the leadership of David Bick, another Wisconsin colleague of Jacob’s and a Board-certified physician in pediatrics, clinical genetics, and clinical molecular genetics. Jacob’s goal for HudsonAlpha and the Smith Family Clinic: “doing basic research at the speed of the clinic.” At the 2016 Genomic Medicine Conference at HudsonAlpha, Jacob was emphatic: “The future of sequencing is not research, it’s clinical.”
In his new position at AbbVie, Jacob will be disconnected from the clinic for the first time. He acknowledges that it will be a shift, but is convinced the opportunity will be worth it.
“I think it’s just going to be different ways of connecting with the patients,” he said. “I do believe that we will, as part of this process, ultimately need to tie in with clinical centers in different ways. … My eye has always been: how do we get this to patients. And I still view it that way. But the tradeoff is, now there’s lots and lots of genomes.”