Paul Lasko, scientific director of the Institute of Genetics at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
July 8, 2010
Joseph Hall
HEALTH REPORTER
Lasko, a renowned McGill University geneticist, says patience is all that is missing from current genome judgments.
“A 10th anniversary is an arbitrary time point,” he said in an email interview. “Writing off a worldwide intellectual and technical effort that promises to revolutionize how we deliver health care as a ‘bust’ is hugely premature.”
Lasko looks to the Internet for a parallel, saying it took four decades for that technology to evolve into the world-altering force it has become.
“Was the Internet a bust because it took almost 20 years for it to do anything commercial and another 20 to become the powerful economic and societal force it is today?” he asks. “In the realm of health care, genomics has the same game-changing potential, and a bit of patience is warranted.”
Indeed, Lasko says, the multibillion-dollar sequencing project has already paid enormous dividends and is likely to pay out more in the immediate future.
Of some 6,800 known genetic disorders, he says, about 2,000 relevant genes have been identified, most using the genomic sequencing.
And as the cost of sequencing begins to plummet, making it more feasible to look at families with known genetic disorders, a catalogue of the remaining genes could be completed within the next three years.
Yet Lasko admits genome-wide studies have shown the genetic underpinnings of ailments like cancer and heart disease are vague at best. This has lessened the hope that genetic screens for such diseases could come on line, one of the genome project’s major promises.
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