The Million Veteran Program: Building VA’s Mega-Database for Genomic Medicine
By Joel Kupersmith and Timothy O'Leary,
Health Affairs
| 11. 19. 2012
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick (and Wilkins) being named Nobel Prize recipients for discovering DNA, the genetic code. In the half century since, there has been an exponential growth of knowledge and accomplishment based on their findings. More recently, a confluence of scientific and technical advances have made possible vast progress in our understanding of human disease, its diagnosis, and the most effective treatment(s). Among these advances are genetic testing, high performance computing platforms, and the electronic health record (EHR), which together offer the possibility of clinically rich databases that link genetic information to treatment outcomes.
These and other advances have made it clear that the genetic predispositions to adult diseases are in many cases extremely complex. In its early phases, human genetics focused on single genes for single diseases that generally occurred in childhood; e.g., Tay-Sachs disease. The genomics of adult diseases—such as coronary heart disease—are associated with complexity resulting from multigene interactions and strong environmental influences (e.g., lifestyle and exposures), that may in some cases result in organ-specific “epigenetic” changes that modify DNA...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...