erictopol.substack.com/p/the-missing-chip

Multiple academic medical centers besides the University of Chicago and Cleveland Clinic publicly state that they operate dedicated clinics for clonal hematopoiesis.

• Mayo Clinic published an article on January 28, 2023 titled “Clonal hematopoiesis clinic stratifies risk for patients with cancer” and explicitly says Dr. Patnaik “leads the Cancer Center's efforts to detect variants in the CHIP clinic” and that “The CHIP clinic is a collaborative effort between the Cancer Center and Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine.”
• NYU Langone Health has a page titled “Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminant Potential (CHIP) Clinic” that says “The Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminant Potential Clinic, part of NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center and its Center for Blood Cancers...”
• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has a patient page on clonal hematopoiesis that asks “What is Memorial Sloan Kettering's CH clinic?” and answers that “MSK's CH clinic is made up of CH specialists...”

Because these are additional academic centers with publicly described CHIP/CH clinics, the statement that there are “currently 2 academic centers” with dedicated CHIP clinics is factually incorrect.

This wording overstates the trial’s findings.

The study Topol cites was an exploratory substudy of the LoDoCo2 trial. In the paper’s abstract, the authors report that overall CH clone size increased in both groups: placebo was associated with a 14.9% annual increase, while colchicine was associated with a nonsignificant 6.3% increase. Crucially, the paper says that the difference between treatment arms was not statistically significant (P interaction = 0.13).

The statistically significant finding was narrower: colchicine was associated with attenuated clonal growth in TET2 CH (P interaction = 0.04). The authors’ conclusion is correspondingly limited: they say colchicine was associated with attenuated clonal expansion in TET2 CH, not that it generally or consistently reduced CHIP overall.

So the accurate summary is that the study suggested a possible benefit — especially for TET2-mutated clonal hematopoiesis — but it did not establish a consistent overall reduction of CHIP across the trial population.