Pharmacogenomics, genetic testing and ethnic variability: tackling the ethical questions

Dr Winkelmann is the Head of the Cooperation Unit for Pharmacogenomics and Applied Genomics in Heidelberg, which was founded in 2001 by the Department of Internal Medicine VI and the Coordination Centre for Clinical Trials at the University of Heidelberg. His main interests are sophisticated phenotyping procedures for patient characterization and the conduct of multicenter clinical trials according to international standards with state-of-the-art data management. He currently applies new genomic tools in order to achieve progress in personalized medicine using collaborating networks of general practitioners for patient enrollment. The focus of his research group is on the common complex genetic cardiovascular and metabolic diseases ranging from coronary artery disease, dyslipidemia and hypertension, to metabolic syndrome and diabetes mellitus. In collaboration with partners from biotech, the genomic techniques used in clinical studies include haplotyping of candidate genes, gene expression profiling of peripheral leucocytes and proteomics in order to identify new biomarkers of effect in therapeutic studies or pathway/target gene identification in disease-specific family studies using microarray-based linkage approaches. An innovative web-based remote data entry system with an integrated pedigree drawing tool is used in the family studies. Dr Winkelmann is also involved as the clinical database coordinator for a European Framework VI research initiative of leading European centers in cardiovascular genetics for identification of risk genes for atherothrombosis in coronary artery disease by transcriptome and proteome analysis and high throughput exon resequencing at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK.