# Integrating genetics and health data to discover common drug effects on cancer and Alzheimer's disease

> **NIH NIH R35** · UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL · 2024 · $366,951

## Abstract

Project summary/abstract
Most Americans past middle age are taking one or more common drugs, and these drugs may have hidden
impacts on their subsequent risk of major health outcomes like cancer or Alzheimer's disease. Discovering
such drug effects could improve disease prevention and suggest drug repurposing opportunities. One
approach to this end is to follow the outcomes of people taking each common drug, as recorded in health
records data. While health data is growing in size and detail, it is noisy and incomplete. There is a critical need
for new methods to discover drug effects from existing data sources. We propose novel systematic approaches
to assess drug-wide association with cancer or Alzheimer's disease by modeling the health record. One
innovative concept is our parallel efforts mining independent genetics data. We hypothesize drug side effects
can be predicted by analysis of pathological processes shared between the drug's original use and the side
effect disease. Analyzing evidence of shared etiology between health conditions and cancer or dementia, we
will test this hypothesis. Our efforts to systematically discover drug effects from independent health data and
genetics will strengthen our methods. Combining both types of evidence can also allow critical evaluation of
putative drug effects on a late-onset disease. While many data-driven studies leave evaluation of the results to
future work, we integrate rigorous evaluations into our methods as a means to improve them and strengthen
their findings.
 If successful, our findings c improve clinical management of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases,
illnesses of high

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10902054
- **Project number:** 5R35GM151001-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL
- **Principal Investigator:** Rachel Dania Melamed
- **Activity code:** R35 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $366,951
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-08-15 → 2028-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10902054

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10902054, Integrating genetics and health data to discover common drug effects on cancer and Alzheimer's disease (5R35GM151001-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-02 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10902054. Licensed CC0.

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