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Tens of thousands of NHS patients are to be invited to donate their DNA for research as part of a project that aims to make the use of genetic data routine in the health service.

About 40,000 patients with cancer and rare diseases will have their genomes sequenced during the four-year project, which David Cameron claims will transform how serious diseases are diagnosed and treated.

Cancer patients will have DNA from healthy and cancerous tissues read so that doctors can work out which mutations are driving the growth of their tumour cells. The information could help medical teams decide which drugs will be most effective in a patient, but will also identify groups for targeted trials of new therapies.

Beyond cancer, the 100,000 Genomes Project hopes to improve diagnoses of rare diseases caused by genetic mutations. Though rare individually, they take a huge collective toll on public health. More than 5,000 rare diseases, which affect more than 3 million people in the UK, have been identified.

Rare diseases are often spotted in children, but to diagnose a condition...