[extropy-chat] The promise of personalized medicine

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com
Wed Sep 8 05:59:39 UTC 2004


EurekAlert: A new technology developed by scientists at IBM could bring the
promise of personalized medicine one step closer to reality.
Using a basic computer language, the researchers created a "smart" DNA
stream that contains a patient's entire medical record, according to a
report in the upcoming Oct. 11 print edition of the Journal of Proteome
Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the
world's largest scientific society. The report was published online July 22.
With the advent of the genomic revolution, scientists are avidly seeking
correlations between human disease and the architecture of individual genes.
Parsing this huge amount of data could eventually lead to "personalized
medicine," some researchers say, allowing doctors to prescribe the right
drug at the right dose for the right person, based on unique variations in
their DNA.
But to achieve this potential, scientists need a way to store and
efficiently transmit whole sequences of patient DNA with built-in privacy --
a hurdle that has yet to be overcome, according to the authors.
Enter IBM's Genomic Messaging System (GMS). GMS provides a basic computer
language that can be inserted into DNA sequences to bridge the gap between
patient medical records and genetic information, says lead author of the
paper, Barry Robson, Ph.D., a chemist at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center
in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
The stream of information transmitted is basically a "smart" DNA sequence
containing a patient's entire medical record in compressed form as well as
genetic information. The DNA stream could potentially even house images like
MRIs and X-rays.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-09/acs-po090704.php
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