Category Archives: Transhuman News

Sequencing the Human Genome

By: gatechhonor

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Sequencing the Human Genome - Video

AGRC1020 Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome
A draft for AGRC1020 Applied Animal Biology assessment 2013. Article can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00...

By: Hannah Russell

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AGRC1020 Resurrection of DNA Function In Vivo from an Extinct Genome - Video

Public release date: 11-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Kim Newman sciencenews@einstein.yu.edu 718-430-3101 Albert Einstein College of Medicine

April 11, 2013 (BRONX, NY) Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University will join the New York Genome Center (NYGC) as its twelfth Institutional Founding Member (IFM). A collaboration among leading academic medical centers, research universities and commercial organizations, NYGC aims to transform medical research and clinical care by creating one of the largest genomics research facilities in North America.

"Einstein is pleased to join other leading biomedical research institutions as a founding member," said Allen M. Spiegel, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean. "Working together, we can significantly improve our understanding of genetics and help transform biomedical research with the goal of better understanding disease and improving patient care."

NYGC represents an unprecedented sharing of data and resources among premier institutions, which will pave the way for advances in personalized medicine, accelerate the development of new diagnostics and treatments for human diseases, and provide an engine for life science commercialization in the region.

"Albert Einstein College of Medicine has been involved with the New York Genome Center since its very inception," said Robert B. Darnell, M.D., Ph.D., president & scientific director of NYGC. "We are thrilled to formalize our relationship with this prestigious institution and have its researchers participate in the vibrant life of the center."

NYGC's other IFMs include: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University/Weill Cornell Medical College, The Jackson Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York University/NYU School of Medicine, North Shore-LIJ Health System, The Rockefeller University, and Stony Brook University.

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About Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University is one of the nation's premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. In 2012, Einstein received over $160 million in awards from the NIH for major research centers at Einstein in diabetes, cancer, liver disease, and AIDS, as well as other areas. Through its affiliation with Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital for Einstein, and six other hospital systems, the College of Medicine runs one of the largest residency and fellowship training programs in the medical and dental professions in the United States. For more information, please visit http://www.einstein.yu.edu and follow us on Twitter @EinsteinMed.

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Einstein joins the New York Genome Center as 12th institutional founding member

A decade after completion of the Human Genome Project on April 14, 2003, a top official of the National Institutes of Health surveyed the rarefied view from that mountaintop:

Admitting, "we have a long way to go to deliver on the promise of genomic medicine," Eric D. Green, director of the institute devoted to this research, still stressed that progress in some areas has been "amazing."

Scientists have obtained the full genetic script of a woman's unborn baby, and the federal government is already preparing for a future in which all babies will have their genomes sequenced at birth.

Doctors now know the genetic underpinnings of almost 5,000 rare diseases, more than twice as many as a decade ago.

We have learned that humans are more than 99.9% alike in their DNA, and yet so vast is the script - a sequence of almost 3.2 billion chemical bases - that our genome is "astonishing in the depth and breadth of its variation," Green said.

Researchers have also overturned a major foundation of genetics by showing that large portions of the script, up to 80% once dismissed as "junk DNA," actually turn out to have specific biological functions.

To a degree few had expected in the 1990s, the speed of genome sequencing has increased and the cost has dropped. Green pointed out that the first human genome took six to eight years to complete at a cost of roughly $1 billion. On the day it was finished in 2003, scientists were already able to sequence the second human in about three to four months at a cost of $30 million to $50 million.

Today, sequencing a genome takes just one or two days and costs about $5,000; what was once a national scientific quest is now well on its way to becoming a common procedure like an MRI.

And then there are the patients such as Wisconsin youngster Nic Volker, whose genes were sequenced in 2009 and used to diagnose and treat a disease that had never been seen before. Across the country, there has been just a trickle of similar success stories.

However, information from the genetic script is already allowing doctors to treat different cancers with greater precision. By sequencing cancer patients, doctors can figure out what medications will and will not work for them.

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Science of genome-sequencing has rocketed forward in 10 years