We’re used to reading about targeted therapies and the promise of personalised medicine through the application of genomic technologies; this has been something of a hot topic for a number of years and pharmaceutical companies have long since implemented collection of biological samples as standard practice in their clinical trials to facilitate genomic research.
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This last weekend ‘open science’ evangelist Joseph Jackson and his colleagues put on the 2nd annual Open Science Summit (we were a media sponsor). The conference was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.
Researchers around the world are sequencing the genome of different animals and plants, and each new genome brings a different advance. Recently, new genomes have included the potato, the naked mole rat, and the prairie vole, and each will have a different impact on science.
As science becomes more complex, it is changing how we are looking at the drivers of research, and how we will cope with the vast volumes of data that are generated. While this review of the concept of data-driven research looks at science in general, the ideas behind it are crucial for genomics and genetic research.
Welcome to the 1 March 2011 edition of carnival of evolution. This is part of a monthly collection of online writing about evolutionary biology and its cultural and political implications, and is hosted by a different blogger every month.
As we end 2010, it seems a good time to join the scientific world and wish the sequencing of the human genome a happy tenth birthday by looking at what was achieved and see what might be coming next.
In a few years’ time, having your genome sequenced might become a routine medical procedure. New parents will probably even know the complete genetic code of their kids a few minutes after their birth. The technology behind full-genome sequencing is indeed growing unexpectedly fast, leading way to a complete revolution.
As genetic engineering techniques have improved, it has become possible to engineer and design viruses for cancer therapy, by exploiting the oncolytic activity of viruses, as well as creating viruses that can specifically target cancers, deliver anticancer agents, introduce suicide genes, or carry genes for immune system proteins such as GM-CSF, to boost the immune response against the cancer. Viruses could even be designed as personalised medicines, with targets tailored to individual patients.
As genome mapping becomes cheaper and more easily available, genome-wide association studies are associating gene variants with an ever-increasing range of disease traits. This will increase the development and use of genetic testing. But genetic testing carries with it a number of concerns – clinical, financial and psychological.
Gradually, over billions of years, life on earth has evolved from simple self-replicating molecules and single cells with no nucleus to complex multi-cellular organisms. This has been an enormously slow process, relying on millions of chance mutations. Genetic and genome engineering combine the power of evolution with the speed of modern gene modifications to create precise changes many-fold faster than through chance alone.
