Recently in Personal Genome Category

I've been thinking about the future...and what changes I'll see in the next 20 years or so.

Remember Gordy on Star Trek?  Eyeglasses combined with brain implants?  That could be possible.  Implants are being developed to help spinal cord injuries recover movement, and visual sensors and monitors are increasing in capability.  I can see the possibilities of visual implants and optical visors coming about...

And today, I read about another step forward in the research into human genomes."

Complete Genomics, a Mountain View startup, announced Tuesday that it had deciphered 14 full human genomes for customers that include pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and leading medical research institutes, a significant step for an industry whose work could revolutionize health care.  "This is just the beginning. The real action starts later next year. Then you'll start to see important medical results come out."

All life-forms carry a genome, a full strand of chromosomes that is a reflection of its hereditary traits. Deciphering, or "sequencing," a genome generates a vast amount of raw data that researchers are trying to decode in a quest to understand how heredity influences various maladies. Reid said he expects the company to produce 10,000 sequenced genomes by the end of 2010, greatly enhancing the potential for meaningful discovery.

The genomes, they said, are being studied by customers to validate the company's technology and for small-scale studies of four types of cancer (breast, lung, colorectal and melanoma), HIV and schizophrenia.

The aim is to use this previously unavailable whole genome data to accurately characterize the tumor and identify its vulnerabilities, which in turn can be used to design more effective therapies. The customers include the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Duke University, Brigham & Women's Hospital, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the Institute for Systems Biology and Broad Institute of MIT, and Harvard.

There will be more radical changes in preventative and emergency care, I feel sure. I anticipate that sensors, monitors and controllers will provide some of the most commonplace changes that benefit seniors. I can see rolling in a diagnostic cart much like we roll in an oxygen cart today.

Can't you?

Esther Dyson has been an innovator in the high tech fields.  She has now turned her attention to health care and how information processing can improve options for health care choices.  That led to an interest and career focus on the mapping of the human genome.  But it's about good healthcare more than about genomes -- "if you know more about yourself and how things work, on the margin, chances are, you're going to be more healthy."

Esther Dyson: The idea behind the Personal Genome Project was created by George Church at Harvard Medical School. It begins with ten people who volunteer to put their entire genome and all their health records online for anybody to see, with our identities visible. And the idea there was, in a sense, to demystify it. And then, ultimately, to [map] hundreds of thousands of people, so that we'd have a lot more data to [use to] explore the genome and medical care and so forth and so on. Most medical research, certainly when it's published, is with unidentified subjects. And the idea here was for us to be role models, to prove that this information wasn't secret, or scary, or dangerous.

Dyson is an investor in 23andMe. 23andMe, Inc. is a privately-held company dedicated to helping individuals understand their own genetic information using recent advances in DNA analysis technologies and web-based interactive tools. 23andMe enables individuals to gain deeper insights into personal ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits. 23andMe was founded in April 2006 by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki.

The name 23andMe refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up each individual's genome. 23andMe connects individuals to their unique, paired set of 23 chromosomes.

With a tube of saliva and $399, you can get the latest information about your DNA from 23andMe. Discover how your genes affect your health. Get information on 114 traits and diseases. See your personal history through a new lens with detailed information about your ancient ancestors and comparisons to global populations today. See what you have in common with other members of 23andMe, and what makes you unique. Their community discusses new topics every day, ranging from questions about the latest research discoveries to answers about the genetics of family resemblances. 

Individuals are beginning to assemble their own health records -  what the other doctors have done, what drugs you have taken and are taking, what conditions you might have--your genetic information could be helpful here.  Times are changing --  there are companies now that are already using drug-interaction databases. "somebody who's taking 18 or 19 different drugs and you take 10 of them away, and the patient gets better rather than worse. So, that's the first part, just the patient having the data aggregated in one place."  Dyson points out that people are interested in their own health details -- and that doctors might not have the interest or time to delve into personal histories the same way individuals are.  Genomes are part of that "detail".  

Genomes themselves give you only--with a few exceptions--percentages. So, it's not like you put this information up and people are going to stick pins into it. I actually was expecting more medical spam about, you know, "We looked at your genome. You should buy such and such nutri-ceutical." What will be exciting is when you have hundreds of thousands of these and you say, "Oh, wow. They're these five genes that seem to interact." Most things are not a gene. It's usually a lot of different genes--and then, combined with what you eat and whether you sleep enough and whether you stay warm enough and all these other things--that actually produce a real outcome in a person of being in such and such condition.

Health care is changing, and information technology is leveling the playing field some now -- and as Esther predicts, more in the future.

Esther Dyson: I think you'll see a lot of changes in five to ten years. But not for everybody. Like everything else, this is going to benefit--let's face it--the rich and the well educated first. They're the ones right now who, if they have a problem, they probably have a friend at Mount Sinai [Hospital]. And so, they can get the best care anyway. You shouldn't need a friend at Mount Sinai to get good cancer care. That's the real difference. There will still be a leg for people who live in the wrong place or who are at the bottom of the pyramid. When you do things with computers and with IT, they actually scale very well. So, you can't reproduce the friend at Mount Sinai. But you can reproduce an information system that gives you access to the same information.