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In an unusual move, a leading genetic testing company is putting genetic information from the people it has tested into the public domain, a move the company says could make a large trove of data available to researchers looking for genes linked to various diseases.
The company, Ambry Genetics, is expected to announce that it will put information from 10,000 of its customers into a publicly available database called AmbryShare.
“We’re going to discover a lot of new diagnostic targets and a lot of new drug targets,” Aaron Elliott, interim chief scientific officer at Ambry, which is based in Southern California, said in an interview. “With our volume, we can pull out a significant number of genes just by the sheer number we are looking at.”
Pooling data from many people is considered crucial to finding the genetic elements that contribute to illnesses. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative plans to assemble a database containing genetic and medical information from a million people to be used for research.
The 10,000 people all have or have had breast or ovarian cancer and were tested by Ambry to see if they have genetic variants that increase the risk of those diseases. AmbryShare will not contain the actual exome of each person, because that would pose a risk to patient privacy. Rather it will contain aggregated data on the genetic variants.
Read full, original post: Genetic Test Firm to Put Consumers’ Data in Public Domain
