Even though doctors and researchers have made great strides in caring for patients in the past few decades, there are still many illnesses that are difficult to diagnose, let alone treat. Among the most heartbreaking cases are those newborns who come down with mysterious illnesses that defy medical expertise. But in recent years, doctors have turned to genetic sequencing in some of these cases to identify the culprit causes of the illnesses.
Last year, the National Institutes of Health fundedfour pilot projects looking into the efficacy and ethics of genetic screening for otherwise inexplicable illnesses in newborns. The first of the trials will begin next week at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, as reported in a recent story from Nature. The trial at Children's Mercy Hospital will focus on rapid genome sequencing with a 24-hour turn-around. Genetic sequencing normally takes weeks, but some of these infants don't survive that long. Doctors have used similar rapid genome sequencing to diagnose an infant with cardiac defects at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to report on a rare genetic mutation that leads young infants to develop inflammatory bowel disease. I spoke with some parents of children with the mutation, which was identified by sequencing the children's exome - just the protein-producing part of the genome - as part of a new project (separate from the NIH trials) at the University of Toronto in Canada. As I explain in the piece, getting a bone marrow transplant early enough can help alleviate symptoms and save the child's life.
The parents were uniformly grateful for the sequencing technology that made it possible to understand what was causing their baby's illness, even in cases where the child didn't survive long after diagnosis. One mother mentioned that realizing some of the best doctors in the country didn't know what was ailing her daughter made the experience even more frightening. After months of worried confusion about their young children's deteriorating health, for these parents to have an answer was a relief.
But because the technique is so new, several ethical details still need clarification - which the NIH study hopes to answer. From the Nature news story:
Misha Angrist, a genomic-policy expert at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that although the 24-hour genome process is impressive, it is not clear whether genomic sequencing of newborns will soon become standard practice. Many questions remain about who will pay for sequencing, who should have access to the data and how far clinicians should go in extracting genome information that is unrelated to the disease at hand. Then there is the question of how informative the process is. "I think it's really important that we do these experiments so that we start to see what that yield is," Angrist says.
All four teams will include an ethicist who will be responsible for dealing with questions like the ones Angrist raises. The other three trials at Boston Children's Hospital, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and at the University of California, San Francisco are still awaiting approval from the Federal Drug Adminstration.
Previously: Stanford patient on having her genome sequenced: "This is the right thing to do for our family" When ten days = a lifetime: Rapid whole-genome sequencing helps critically ill newborn Assessing the challenges and opportunities when bringing whole-genome sequencing to the bedside Whole genome sequencing: The known knowns and the unknown unknowns
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