![]() "Genetics is very helpful to study diseases and there's massive scope for genetic therapies," said Curtis.īut the new boom has also shown the limits of genetic medicine. We've already seen some success in gene-based therapies, from retraining immune cells to fight cancer to using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tools to treat sickle cell disease. The next big benefit lies in being able to create new therapies by studying the genetic mutations in the lab. Scientists have found mutated genes that cause cancers, heart disease, diabetes, you name it. If these genes are damaged, it has a huge effect on your schizophrenia risk," Curtis told DW.Īnd it's not just schizophrenia where we've linked genes with diseases. "In the last few years of big sequencing studies, we've found the first gene for schizophrenia. "The idea that you can get the whole genome sequence of a sick baby and understand why they're sick within days is remarkable," said David Curtis, a professor of medical genetics at University College London, UK.įor Curtis, it's this routine use of genetic technology in clinical practice that is the biggest benefit to come from the HGP. By sequencing the genomes of more than a million people since 2003, scientists have seen how genetic variation between people affects the risk of disease. Genomic medicine has been at the heart of the biological revolution. But a revolution in biological sciences began in 2003, as genome technologies transformed our understanding of human disease, our evolutionary history and what it means to be human. Some of these developments have come to pass, others were fanciful. (Also Read | What is a genome, anyway? The myths, a timeline and links to the stars ) But by then we would have developed the therapies needed to treat those diseases. We would read our genome sequences like coffee grains in a cup to predict if we develop diseases in the future. We would discover how genes are involved in diseases. We would discover our ancestral histories. While the sequence was partially incomplete and assembled from bits of several people's DNA, the HGP was a monumental achievement of technology and science. The map itself consisted of three billion units of DNA, essentially a blueprint of a human being. The Human Genome Project gave us the first sequence of the human genome, kickstarting a revolution in biology. "This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind," then-US president Bill Clinton said in June 2000, when the first draft of the human genome sequence was revealed at the White House. Twenty years ago today, an international group of scientists in the Human Genome Project (HGP) published the very first sequence of the human genome.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |