A $25,000 Challenge to Make Sense of Genetic Information
Genome sequencing is poised to get even cheaper — perhaps costing as little as $1,000 by the end of the year, as the WSJ recently reported.
But being able to bang out a patient’s genome relatively inexpensively and quickly — Life Technologies says it expects to soon be able to deliver that information in a day — is only the starting point.
There are challenges “at all levels of interpreting whole genomes from measurement all the way to the final clinical report,” says Isaac Kohane, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston. He is one of the organizers of the CLARITY Challenge, the hospital’s newly announced $25,000 competition to encourage scientific teams to develop standards for analyzing, interpreting and reporting relevant genomic findings to physicians and patients.
Genome analysis is “an exciting technology” and has “come into practical fruition in the last couple of years, but a lot of work needs to be done to make it usable in a clinically responsible fashion,” says Kohane.
Competition participants will get de-identified genome sequences (from Life Technologies and Complete Genomics, which are sponsors of the challenge) and clinical summaries covering three children and their families. The children all have a rare disease with a suspected […]
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