December 27, 2011

Mayo Clinic plans to sequence patients’ genomes to personalise care

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Doctors have drawn up plans to sequence the full genetic code of thousands of people in a landmark project to personalise their medical care.

Volunteers will have all six billion letters of their genome read, stored and linked to their medical records to help doctors prescribe more effective drugs and other therapies.

The prestigious Mayo Clinic in the US will launch the pilot study early next year as part of an ambitious move towards an era of "proactive genomics" that puts modern genetics at the centre of patient care…

Dr Gianrico Farrugia, director of the Centre for Individualised Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said the cost of sequencing a person's whole genome – some 23,000 genes – has fallen so rapidly that it was now comparable to the price of a single gene test.

Guardian by Ian Sample, 12/26/11

Tags: Genomics, Research

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