Weekly Roundup: Science Funding, DTC and Medical Device Caucusing
With so many developments at the intersection of genomics and the law, there are often a variety of interesting stories that, for one reason or another, don’t find their way into a full-length posting on the Genomics Law Report. Here we recap several recent key developments and, at bottom, round up all of the recent tweets from @genomicslawyer.
The Continuing Threat of Decreased Science Funding. At least for the moment, the two houses of Congress appear, finally, to be edging toward a budget compromise that would bridge the $51 billion gap between the House bill (which passed at the beginning of March) and the most recent Senate proposal. That’s a good thing, given that the current continuing resolution is set to expire on April 8.
Nevertheless, it seems increasingly clear that federal science funding is unlikely to increase from its fiscal year 2010 levels, and funding almost certainly will not meet the targets President Obama set in his FY 2012 budget proposal.
What ELSI was New? Plenty.
From October 5 to December 8, 2009, the Genomics Law Report featured a series of thirty-six guest commentaries by industry, academic and thought leaders in the fields of genomics and personalized medicine. Entitled What ELSI is New?, the series, which we have organized into an e-book (pdf), asked each contributor to briefly respond to the following question: “What do you believe is the most important ethical, legal or social issue (ELSI) that must be addressed by the fields of genomics and/or personalized medicine?”
For better or worse, that’s where the instructions ended. The invited contributors identified the ELSI of their choice and discussed (or not) their rationale for so selecting as they saw fit. In addition to refraining from substantive editing, we intentionally avoided coordinating commentaries. Although we encouraged independent submissions from a variety of contributors and deprived them of any advance knowledge of what others in the series would say, one of our hopes was that consensus would begin to form around certain key ethical, legal and social issues.
To some degree this occurred. In collecting the series for the convenience of readers who would like to have all of the contributions in one place (pdf), we have ultimately settled on six broad topic headings for the commentaries
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Completing the Personal Genomics Toolkit
The big news buzzing through the world of genomics this afternoon is the publication of a paper in the journal Science announcing the production of three whole-genome sequences at an average materials cost of $4,400. The work was performed by the third-generation sequencing company Complete Genomics Incorporated, along with researchers from George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School.
The Race for the $1,000 Genome
Erika Check Hayden of Nature’s blog The Great Beyond has an excellent summary of the Complete announcement in which she also attempts to head off some of the inevitable media hype:
Complete’s $4,400 price tag doesn’t include costs for the company’s infrastructure, such as its Silicon Valley data farm and the army of analysts and technicians required to make sense of the data; the company lists more than 60 employees in this paper’s author list. The company is actually selling genomes at $20,000 apiece in minimum orders of five; costs go down as the order size increases. That puts it slightly behind the schedule it set at its launch; the $5,000 genomes won’t be available until next year.
The announcement from Complete Genomics is hardly unexpected. At its launch last fall the company promised that it would deliver $5,000 genomes (and 1,000 of them, not just 3) by the end of 2009.
From a personal genomics standpoint, there is no question that Complete is a viable contender in the race to deliver affordable, individual whole-genome sequences. Spurred by competition from the likes of IBM, Illumina, Pacific Biosciences, Oxford Nanopore and others, the $1,000 genome continues to draw closer. It is no longer a question of if but when that magic number will be attained.
But while the $1,000 genome competition makes for an exciting horserace, the real focus of today’s announcement should be not on how much a genome sequence costs, but on what you can (or cannot) do with that sequence.
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Does Familiarity Breed Acceptance? New Program Encourages Young Doctors to Get Personal with DTC Genomics.
The Genomics Law Report launched its new series What ELSI is New? yesterday with guest commentaries from Hank Greely and Misha Angrist. One of the issues that both Greely and Angrist tackle—from different angles and with decidedly different styles—is the widely acknowledged shortage of health care professionals qualified to understand and interpret genomic information of increasing prevalence and complexity.
By sheer coincidence, yesterday’s Boston Globe profiled a new program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that invites pathology residents to learn about DTC genetic testing in a novel way: by becoming customers themselves.
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What ELSI is New?
On Monday the Genomics Law Report will debut a series of guest commentaries by industry, academic and thought leaders in the fields of genomics and personalized medicine. The series is modeled on the Nature Genetics 2007 Question of the Year (“What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?”) with a slight modification.
Entitled What ELSI is New?, the series will feature commentators responding to the following question: “What do you believe is the most important ethical, legal or social issue (ELSI) that must be addressed by the fields of genomics and/or personalized medicine?” The purpose of the series is to identify a wide range of ethical, legal and social issues that must be addressed to fully realize the promise of genomics and personalized medicine.
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