In the keynote address to 300 attendees at the Future of Genomic Medicine III conference in La Jolla, California (March 5-6, 2010), Dr. Leroy Hood, President of the Institute for Systems Biology, sketched his optimistic vision of the future of personalized DNA-based medicine, and predicted that within five years it will be possible to sequence an entire human genome in under an hour for a cost of $500 or less. He emphasized the importance of taking a systems approach to biological investigations and described how such an approach had been applied to the analysis of prion disease in a mouse model. Dr. Hood also outlined the first-ever full genome sequencing of a complete family of two children and both parents, in which both children had inherited the same two rare recessive genetic diseases (Miller’s syndrome and primary ciliary dyskinesia), but both parents were unaffected. The analysis of the four complete sequences revealed the two disease genes that were inherited by both affected children. Dr. Hood noted that the ability to compare all four related sequences allowed for a significant increase in sequencing accuracy. Dr. Hood also envisioned a future of individual patients surrounded by clouds of data points that might prove key to their individual diagnoses and therapies, and he emphasized that biology is an informational science. He noted that the management and interpretation of data will be crucial going forward. He said that a critical goal for medical genetic tests is that they be both predictive and actionable. Dr. Hood was just one of many luminaries who took to the podium at this year’s conference, hosted by the Scripps Translational Science Institute and the J. Craig Venter Institute, and sponsored by a number of major biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
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