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Scientists have developed a way to sift through millions of differences in a person’s genetic blueprint to detect those that threaten our health, and have tested the new tool on a biomedical database of more than 450,000 people in the United Kingdom, according to a series of papers published Thursday in the journal Science.
The research marks a critical step toward harnessing the full power of the genome for medicine, and it demonstrates a new way artificial intelligence can be applied to problems in human health, experts said.
One problem that has frustrated doctors for years stems from the fact that although we are 99.6 percent similar at the level of DNA, each of us has an average of 4 million variants, sections of the genetic code where we differ from one another.
“It has been extremely difficult to determine which ones cause disease and which ones don’t,” said Kyle Farh, vice president of artificial intelligence at the San Diego-based biotechnology company Illumina.
Farh and an international team of almost 100 researchers created an algorithm designed to help medicine clear...
