“The focus of the biobank is to create a community resource that will be available to researchers throughout the country,” Coriell chief scientific officer Alissa Resch said. “Once we collect samples from all of the participants in these studies, we would make these samples available to researchers who are doing work in this field so that we could enable them to continue to perform studies that would get at basic questions about opioid use disorder.”
“The idea behind this project is to study the spectrum of opioid use," said Stefan Zajic, PhD, principal research scientist at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. "All the way from patients receiving an opioid for pain relief ... to a more problematic condition where someone has developed a use disorder or addiction to the most severe outcome you could imagine which would be an overdose death."
“This is the first biobank of its kind in the nation,” said Alissa Resch, chief scientific officer at Coriell. “You can also use the genetic information from DNA to basically identify new genes that would potentially be involved in these disease pathways,” she said.
“There are many biobanks of brains in the world but none of them, as I know, contain strictly brains from individuals who have died from opioid addiction,” says Thomas Ferraro, PhD, professor of biomedical sciences at Cooper Medical School.
Ferraro says that the project is one of the biggest of his lifetime – an in-depth look at just what causes a person to develop an opioid addiction.
"We are experts in personalized medicine and we wanted to apply that to a crucial health problem," said Stefan Zajic, PhD, principal research scientist with the Coriell Institute for Medical Research.
“Scientifically and geographically, this team is uniquely well positioned to undertake this effort. This investment in our state’s future speaks to the foresight and vision of the elected leaders of New Jersey and to the innovative scientists and physicians at these Camden institutions,” said Alissa Resch, PhD, chief scientific officer at the Coriell Institute. “The knowledge gleaned from this work has the potential to save New Jersey families from the tragedy of opioid use disorder.”
“This initiative has the potential to define risk factors for opioid addiction and develop strategies to prevent people from developing opioid use disorder and to thereby save lives," Dr. Annette Reboli, dean of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, said in a statement. "This collaboration is perhaps one of the most important we could undertake for the health of so many at-risk individuals.”
“We’re really trying to look at the interplay between the genetic and non-genetic factors that explain opioid abuse disorder,” said Alissa Resch, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at the Coriell Institute. “We’re letting the data speak for itself, and [seeing] what kind of trends emerge.”
“As the leading academic tertiary care health system and the only Level I Trauma Center in southern New Jersey, Cooper’s emergency department physicians see the destructive effects of the opioid crisis every day,” said Anthony J. Mazzarelli, M.D., J.D., M.B.E., Co-President Cooper University Health Care. “While Cooper has designed innovative clinical programs to combat opioid addiction, we believe this research will lead to the development of new weapons to aid our clinicians in the fight against this costly epidemic.”
Three institutions in Camden are teaming up for a unique approach to fighting opioid addiction.
The Coriell Institute for Medical Research, Cooper University Health Care, and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University are launching the Camden Opioid Research Initiative (CORI), to investigate the genetic and biological factors that contribute to the development of opioid use disorder.
“Scientifically and geographically, this team is uniquely well positioned to undertake this effort. This investment in our state’s future speaks to the foresight and vision of the elected leaders of New Jersey and to the innovative scientists and physicians at these Camden institutions,” said Alissa Resch, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at the Coriell Institute. “The knowledge gleaned from this work has the potential to save New Jersey families from the tragedy of opioid use disorder.”
“This collaboration is perhaps one of the most important we could undertake for the health of so many at-risk individuals,” Dr. Annette Reboli, dean of Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, said.
CORI will capitalize on Coriell’s expertise in genomics, biobanking and personalized medicine, Cooper University Health Care’s clinical infrastructure and expertise in treating opioid use disorder (OUD) patients, and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University’s reputation for scientific excellence in genetics, the neurosciences and addiction research. This combination of expertise promises to bolster the foundation of addiction genomics and provide a unique resource to researchers across the nation. Each of the CORI institutions is on the front lines of this battle and sees firsthand the impact OUD has on New Jersey and its citizens.
