Healthy Oregon Project, otherwise known as “HOP”, started in 2018 and is supported by the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute’s Center for Early Detection Advanced Research (CEDAR). The goal of the project is to perform germline sequencing on hundreds of thousands of Oregonians in order to identify individuals who are at increased risk for cancer or cardiovascular disease. The project will have multiple potential benefits, including: 1) helping individuals who are at increased risk of disease to get proper screening; 2) expanding testing to blood relatives so that whole families can be monitored; 3) over time, providing data back to the Knight that relates genotype to cancer incidence; and 4) allow exploration of how environmental factors may interact with genotypic risk.
HOP uses an innovative, smartphone-based approach to obtaining a participant’s consent and collecting general health information. Once the data are entered, the participant uses a provided tube of mouthwash to donate their DNA, and the barcode from this tube is recorded into the smartphone app. Negative results are returned directly through the app. Positive results are confirmed with a second test and results are delivered to participants by a qualified geneticist.
To date, 2156 samples have been sequenced and analyzed by the KDL. Thus far, 94% have been negative and 4.6% have yielded a clinically informative result. Important variants have been identified across a wide range of genes.
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HOP Project