Cancer Centers Racing to Map Patients’ Genes

A recent New York Times article talks about the "arms race" that is taking place in the genetic community. Millions of dollars have been spent in recent years to create a way to quickly and effectively process genetic and other biological information. Mount Sinai medical center recently developed a $3 million supercomputer capable of making quick work of this information, while other New York hospitals and colleges are spending more than half a billion dollars on research facilities! This arms race has become a crucial part of an ongoing war: the war against cancer and other diseases.

The belief is that eventually being able to routinely sequence everyone's genome would lead to "precision medicine" or treatment based on the unique characteristics of a patient's genes. John Hopkins is looking to, within the next two years, develop a systematic genomic sequencing program that also includes an individual's environment, family history and other factors in order to create preventative  medicines (seen here) specific to the individual. The hope is that by understanding the genome, and where diseases come from, that scientists and doctors can, at the earliest age, implement preventive measures and medicines to combat diseases.

Although scientists are still a long way from generating useful information from the genome, this new race to be the first to do so, will speed up the process as well as increase the amount of genomes able to be sequenced.