The National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute says it is awarding $18.5 million to establish a collaborative group of 22 academic institutions to identify patients at high risk for serious side effects from a common group of anti-inflammatory drugs.

The international Personalized NSAID Therapeutics Consortium (PENTACON) will attempt to use molecular diagnostic tests to evaluate patient response to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. It will be led by Garred FitzGerald, director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.

The program is scheduled to unfold over the next ten years with the $18.5 million grant to be allotted over the next five years.

More than 30 types of NSAIDs, like Celebrex and Aleve, exist on the market today and according to the American Gastroenterological Association, more than 30 million people take over-the-counter and prescription NSAIDs every day for pain, headaches, and arthritis.

NSAIDs come with a fair share of side effects including stomach upsets and sometimes even life-threatening bleeding from the gastrointestinal tract. And the sheer variety of such drugs means that individuals often have different reactions and preferences for them. Just over a decade ago, NSAIDs less likely to cause gastrointestinal problems such as Vioxx were introduced to the market, only to be later found to cause heart attacks, heart failure, and strokes in a small portion of patients who used them.

“There’s a great need to understand how people differ in their response to NSAIDs and how their use might be tailored to the needs and susceptibilities of the individual patient,” says FitzGerald.

Researchers still don’t have a way to predict whether patients will actually gain relief from NSAIDs. PENTACON will aim to develop ways to address individual response to NSAIDs and manage the risk of side effects by using genetics and harnessing the power of contemporary “omics” technologies—genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. FitzGerald hopes that the study will ultimately lead to a scenario where a patient can input his or her genomic data into an app and be told which NSAIDs are appropriate for them to take and at what dose, or whether they should be taking NSAIDs at all.