How Will Genomic Information Impact the Future of Health Care? The genomic revolution, ushered in by the completion of the human genome project in 2003, promises to deepen our understanding of human life. Many scientists hope that by undertaking genomic sequencing of large swaths of the human population we will be able to shed light on such diverse areas as the history of the species, the conspiracy of environment with the genome, and the genetic idiosyncrasies of drug metabolism. Encouraged by these prospects, large-scale genetic databases, or biobanks, were created worldwide to take advantage of the skyrocketing efficiency of high-throughput genomics techniques.
Research universities, pharmaceutical companies, government organizations, and private corporations have launched initiatives to found repositories of biological samples, many of which exist as isolated silos contained within their respective institutions. Some biobanks focus on a particular disease process or condition, such as breast cancer or inflammatory bowel disease. TA65 study. Multivitamin and telomeres. Multivitamin and telomeres. Meditation on telomerase activity.
Med Diet and Telomeres. Effect of comprehensive lifestyle changes on telomerase. Mail Order Telomeres WSJ. Telomere length and cardio disease. Adiponectin activates AMP activated and Metformin helps too. Serotonin transporter polymorphism (5HTTLPR), severe childhood abuse and depressive symptom trajectories in adulthood | British Journal of Psychiatry Open.
Abstract Background Cross-sectional studies suggest that the serotonin transporter promoter region polymorphism (5-HTT gene-linked polymorphic region, 5HTTLPR) moderates the relationship between childhood abuse and major depressive disorder. Aims To examine whether the 5HTTLPR polymorphism moderates the effect childhood abuse has on 5-year depressive symptom severity trajectories in adulthood. Method At 5-year follow-up, DNA from 333 adult primary care attendees was obtained and genotyped for the 5HTTLPR polymorphism. Linear mixed models were used to test for a genotype × childhood abuse interaction effect on 5-year depressive symptom severity trajectories. Results After covariate adjustment, homozygous s allele carriers with a history of severe childhood abuse had significantly greater depressive symptom severity at baseline compared with those without a history of severe childhood abuse and this effect persisted throughout the 5-year period of observation.
Declaration of interest None. Serotonin transporter polymorphism (5HTTLPR), severe childhood abuse and depressive symptom trajectories in adulthood | British Journal of Psychiatry Open. Now Everyone Can Know What’s In Their DNA. The robots handle the saliva with care. They group scores of tiny, rubber-capped test tubes into orderly racks and position them under plunging needles. An articulated arm moves some of them from one automated track to another, and all of them eventually get loaded into a small, box-shaped device whose sole job is to vigorously shake things. This separates patients' DNA from their spit. Everything that this huddle of roughly 200 robotic components is doing is about extracting valuable genetic signals from raw physiological noise.
The automated employees at this mechanical lab in South San Francisco are the clicking, whirring heart of Counsyl, a startup designed to make lifesaving genetic sequencing as commonplace as cholesterol tests. If Counsyl's bright, uncluttered website is your first time visiting a medical-diagnostics lab online, you might be duped into thinking they're all so friendly. "When we started, we thought we were a software company," Srinivasan says. Helix, a New Gene Sequencing Venture, Aims to Create Digital Hub for Genomics.
SAN FRANCISCO — One of the top providers of gene-sequencing technology, , is teaming up with investors in hopes of buttressing the growing universe of genetic analysis businesses. Illumina and the investment firms Warburg Pincus and Sutter Hill Ventures plan to announce on Tuesday that they have created a new venture named Helix that is meant to serve as a hub for a constellation of analytic businesses. The three are investing about $100 million in Helix, and Illumina’s chief executive, Jay T. Flatley, will serve as the venture’s chairman. Other financial details could not be learned. The creation of the new company, which has been in the works for more than a year, is an unusual move that its backers say is meant to help support the genetic analysis ecosystem. What Helix is not meant to do is favor any particular partner. The venture will use Illumina’s technology to sequence customers’ genetic information, and then place that data in the cloud and make it available to partners.
Businessinsider. Just Another Test. Genomics is transforming medicine. Scientific Progress and the Future of Mom and Dad - Prudential - The Atlantic Sponsor Content. Alana Saarinen’s face resembles her mother’s. But her eyes, she says, are her father’s. So far this biological lottery sounds familiar enough (“You have your mother’s voice,” we often say, or, “You smile just like your father”). Except Alana’s story is different: While our DNA can traditionally originate in only one of two options—mother or father—Alana’s originate in three. “I also have DNA from a third lady. But I wouldn’t consider her a parent,” Alana, who is 13, told the BBC last year. Alana is one of less than 50 people in the world known to have DNA from three different people. Some of her mitochondria—which can be thought of as each cell’s power plants—came from a female donor who isn’t her mother. In the coming decades, as public policy increasingly reflects shifts in the future of health and technology, we will likely see many more advances in medicine that challenge our notions of traditional biology--and many more children with stories like Alana’s.
Next: Your Health in a Pill. Genomics is transforming medicine - Business Insider. Soon-Shiong: We have 'Google of genome mapping' Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has some big ideas in healthcare, like a vision of a fully connected ecosystem that truly empowers patients to make informed choices about their own care, aided by supercomputers to crunch all the data, including highly complex genomic information. And he’s not afraid to toot his own horn every once in a while. “We’ve created the Google of genome mapping,” Soon-Shiong, the multibillionaire entrepreneur behind the still-somewhat-mysterious NantHealth and parent company NantWorks, said Monday at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in Los Angeles.
Soon-Shiong explained that as NantHealth builds out its Clinical Operating System — launched in February 2014 with $1 billion behind it — clinicians will be able to browse through an entire genome on a mobile device, through the cloud, and search base genomes to find specific abnormalities that might point to personalized treatments of cancer or other serious diseases. Copyright 2015 MedCity News. NIH Makes Initial Revisions to Guidelines for Genomic Data Analysis in the Cloud. In-icelands-dna-clues-to-what-genes-may-cause-disease. Photo Scientists in Iceland have produced an unprecedented snapshot of a nation’s genetic makeup, discovering a host of previously unknown gene mutations that may play roles in ailments as diverse as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and gallstones. “This is amazing work, there’s no question about it,” said Daniel G.
MacArthur, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the research. “They’ve now managed to get more genetic data on a much larger chunk of the population than in any other country in the world.” In a series of papers published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Genetics, researchers at Decode, an Icelandic genetics firm owned by Amgen, described sequencing the genomes — the complete DNA — of 2,636 Icelanders, the largest collection ever analyzed in a single human population. “From the technical point of view, these papers are a tour-de-force,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.
Dr. Dr. Do you genes determine your entire life? | Julian Baggini | Science. Whenever you read stories about identical twins separated at birth, they tend to follow the template set by the most remarkable of them all: the “two Jims”. James Springer and James Lewis were separated as one-month-olds, adopted by different families and reunited at age 39. When University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard met them in 1979, he found, as a Washington Post article put it, both had “married and divorced a woman named Linda and remarried a Betty.
They shared interests in mechanical drawing and carpentry; their favourite school subject had been maths, their least favourite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day.” Other studies at the world-leading Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research suggest that many of our traits are more than 50% inherited, including obedience to authority, vulnerability to stress, and risk-seeking. Many find this disturbing. The answer would appear to be to justify eternal damnation. 23andMe to Use Genetic Database for Drug Discovery. 23andMe Inc., the personal genetics company, has sold enough DNA spit kits to accumulate genetic information on 850,000 customers. Now it plans to mine that database for drug targets, and it has picked a star drug developer to lead the effort. The closely held Mountain View, Calif., company on Thursday said Richard Scheller, who retired in December as head of research and early development at Roche Holding AG, will become chief science officer next month and will lead a new therapeutics group that will seek to discover new drugs.
The hope is that mutations and other genetic information harbored in the database—along with links to health information customers have provided to 23andMe—will reveal mechanisms and potential drug targets for a range of rare and common diseases. The information is obtained from customers curious about their DNA who submit saliva to the company for genomic analysis. Those partnerships will continue, said Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s chief executive officer.
Dr. Dr. 23andMe to Turn DNA Data Into Drugs in Startup’s Latest Twist - Bloomberg Business. (Bloomberg) -- 23andMe Inc., the Google Inc. -backed genetic-testing startup that popularized a $99 DNA spit test, will expand from screening people for diseases to inventing new medicine to cure them. The Silicon Valley company has recruited a top biotechnology executive to help. Richard Scheller spent almost 15 years at Genentech, heading research and early development at the company that invented pioneering cancer drugs Herceptin and Avastin. He’ll lead 23andMe’s new therapeutics group. It’s the latest evolution for 23andMe, which went from a seller of novelty ancestry kits to one of the world’s biggest repositories of genetic data, doing business with major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer Inc. and Genentech. Now it may compete with those giants.
“Part of what we’re trying to do here is drug discovery in a more efficient model,” Chief Executive Officer Anne Wojcicki said in a telephone interview. Grow Faster Picking Targets He didn’t have to wait long. Outsource. Is Most of Our DNA Garbage? Photo T. Ryan Gregory’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario is a sort of genomic menagerie, stocked with creatures, living and dead, waiting to have their DNA laid bare. Scorpions lurk in their terrariums. Tarantulas doze under bowls. Gregory’s investigations into all these genomes has taught him a big lesson about life: At its most fundamental level, it’s a mess.
After adding a fluorescent dye that attaches to DNA, Jeffrey loaded the vial into a boxy device called a flow cytometer, which sprayed the onion juice and blood through a laser beam. One peak represented my genome, or the entirety of my DNA. “The onion wins,” Gregory said. But why? The human genome contains around 20,000 genes, that is, the stretches of DNA that encode proteins. But in the past few years, the tide has shifted within the field. In January, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, made a comment that revealed just how far the consensus has moved. Continue reading the main story. Researchers Report New Gene Associated With Thyroid LevelsTrending | Labroots | Virtual Events, Webinars and Videos. Thyroid hormones have important and diverse roles in human health and regulate metabolic rate. Thyroid disease is common (affecting 5-10 per cent of the population) and synthetic thyroid hormones are one of the commonest drug therapies prescribed worldwide.
A new study, published in Nature Communications involving University of Bristol academics, reports a new gene called SYN2 associated with thyroid levels. Researchers found the SYN2 gene plays an important role in the control of thyroid stimulating hormone. The study also reports a separate, rare, genetic variant present in only four individuals per 1,000 people that can cause thyroxine levels in the blood to be elevated. Although thyroid hormones are essential for childhood development and maintaining adult health, the genetic control of these important hormones is poorly understood. Source: University of Bristol. Poking Holes in Genetic Privacy. Not so long ago, people who provided DNA in the course of research studies were told that their privacy was assured. Their DNA sequences were on publicly available Web sites, yes, but they did not include names or other obvious identifiers. These were research databases, scientists said, not like the forensic DNA banks being gathered by the F.B.I. and police departments.
But geneticists nationwide have gotten a few rude awakenings, hints that research subjects in fact could sometimes be identified by their DNA alone, or even by the way their cells were using their DNA. The latest shock came in January, when a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to track down five people selected at random from a database using only their DNA, ages and the states in which they lived. And he did it in just hours. Continue reading the main story Video “The problems are not yet solved in any general way,” Dr.
Then Eric E. 23andMe is Silicon Valley's health regulation poster child. By Matthew Perrone Associated Press Posted: 09/11/2014 10:01:00 AM PDT0 Comments|Updated: 6 months ago Co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki. (Dai Sugano/Staff file photo) WASHINGTON -- No Silicon Valley company better embodies the promise and the pitfalls of working in health care than DNA testing firm 23andMe. Launched in 2006 to a flurry of media coverage, the Mountain View-based company seemed to have every strategic advantage: millions in startup cash, celebrity endorsements, and a chief executive married to one of the co-founders of Google. 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki laid out a bold plan to make genetic testing affordable to the general public, while simultaneously building a massive archive of DNA results for use in medical research.
In the aftermath of the FDA letter, 23andMe has brought in four new executives with backgrounds in the health sector. "This has actually been a really good experience for 23andMe because it's taking us up a level," Wojcicki says. 23andme: It’s all about the data | Boston Biotech Watch. By Steve Dickman, CBT Advisors There was a flood of news in late November about the stinging letter that Mountain View, California-based 23andme received from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Because it ignored FDA instead of continuing a years-long dialogue, 23andme was forced, over howls of protest, to stop selling its direct-to-consumer genetic testing panel. Almost lost in the controversy was the company’s now derailed core strategy: to collect a million customers’ worth of genetic data, then mine the data for valuable insights that can give the company an insurmountable competitive advantage. You could try to convince me that the strategy is moot now that 23andme has run into a brick wall at FDA.
That aggregating data as a way both to derive medical benefit and to make money is now as dead as 23andme’s consumer genetics business. Grounded? But I would push back. In my view, this change in business model explains much. I beg to differ. Like this: Like Loading... 23andMe's £125 DNA testing service launches in the UK. Genentech Partners with 23andMe to Inform its Parkinson's Drug Development Efforts with WGS. Regeneron Builds a Database of Human Knockouts in Search for Drug Clues.
Genetic support for insulin system role in growth hormone response | medwireNewsFocus. Mobile.nytimes. Medscape Log In. DNA methylation age of blood predicts all-cause mortality in later life. Genentech Partners with 23andMe to Inform its Parkinson's Drug Development Efforts with WGS | GenomeWeb. Faster DNA Sleuthing Saves Critically Ill Boy.
Nutrigenomics. Genetics. Genetic Screening.