Daniel Dvorkin writes:
"When I first started studying bioinformatics almost fifteen years ago (!) what drew me to the field was the promise that we might soon be able to provide effective, personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases. There have been some successes along the way, like genetic tests for warfarin dosage, but for the most part our gains in understanding of basic biology haven't been matched by clinical advances. Now it looks like that is at long last about to change, and it's about time.
Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there."
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"Genomic Medicine, Finally"
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Aighearach on Saturday March 08 2014, @02:34AM
Do slashvertisements come with free soyledvertisements now?
I read part of the article, so I can tell you the important bits: "Venter is staking his latest entrepreneurial venture on that expectation. Earlier this week, he announced formation of a new company..."
(Score: 5, Funny) by lx on Saturday March 08 2014, @03:16AM
I'll have you know that gnomic medicine is a very difficult field. For one thing you need really tiny stethocopes.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kell on Saturday March 08 2014, @03:14AM
I'd just like to point out that Slashdot has the same article, word for word. I think we can presume that Dvorkin has submitted the identical blurb to Slashdot and Soylent in good faith, but we should be particularly careful about this sort of thing and avoiding any perception of article-stealing.
Scientists point out problems. Engineers fix them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Common Joe on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:24AM
I'm glad you commented about this because this brings up an excellent question for the community.
I expect overlapping articles from time to time and I've seen them, but the word-for-word thing just doesn't sit well with me. Short of the editors reading Slashdot heavily (which I think is a waste of their time), what is the best way to prevent something like this? Or do we even want to prevent something like this? If so, how? I'm mean, it's obvious what Daniel Dvorkin did because the his name is the same in both summaries, but it's really easy to have two different login names at each site and make it look like it is from two different people.
NCommander, if you're reading this, should we open up dialog with Slashdot to get a feel for how they might want to tackle this problem with us? Maybe they are ok with duplicate submissions like this? In any case, I think we should discourage this kind of behavior if we can.
(Score: 1) by Aighearach on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:09PM
I recommend requiring editors to read the article in the submission, and if the purpose of the article is that one of the people it is about just started a new company, or announced a new product, and there is no actual new invention or development in the field in the article, then they should at least be good enough to skip those.
Like this article, it talks about a new company claiming some new low target price,($1000) that may or may not happen, without mentioning the current price ($1500-$2000) and without mentioning the cost of a treatment using this information (about $10k for a full medical analysis). The actual savings represented aren't even 15%, so not even enough to be called a sale for people most likely to benefit. But editors should be at least nerdy enough to read an article, and tell you if it gave you useful information, or if it is just a fluff piece. I mean... come on. Nerds are smart, right? Right?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Saturday March 08 2014, @01:14PM
I submitted the article here at and at Slashdot, obviously, and also at Pipedot. I think it's an interesting and important topic of discussion as well as one I have a personal stake in, and I didn't honestly expect it to get published (if that's the right word) in all three places, which is why the multiple submissions. Do people object to this? If so, I won't do it any more.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [dev.soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 2, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday March 08 2014, @03:16AM
I hope they can put such knowledge to use to eventually look at fibromyalgia, of which I suffer from. It would be nice to have such an explosion of knowledge occur and start to understand processes that have so far frustrated all attempts at analysis. With such testing it might finally be possible to find a common cause between fibromyalgia patients, and finally understand the actual process of what causes the pain.
At this point I just live in pain, which isn't even really pain, as it doesn't even respond to any kind of pain killers or drugs. Even morphine is rather temporary and makes me feel nothing.
We need a new a leap in understanding like this, and I hope it does start to explain whole hosts of illnesses better. Anything is better than just offering palliative care.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 08 2014, @06:02AM
Does this help:t -bath-how-much-does-it-help-with-fibromyalgia-symp toms.htm [about.com]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21742283 [nih.gov]
http://chronicfatigue.about.com/b/2013/04/03/a-ho
Might wish to check if you have magnesium or B12 or other deficiencies.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22271372 [nih.gov]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Saturday March 08 2014, @01:36PM
Fibro's an excellent target for this kind of research. Chronic pain and inflammatory disorders have been GWAS targets for some time, but fibro seems to be particularly challenging because it's polygenic (many, many different genes involved) and may not actually be a single disease but rather a set of common symptoms that have different causes in different patients [plosone.org]. FWIW, though, there are some hopeful results in both the genetics [wiley.com] and the genomics [nih.gov] of the disease, and hopefully this will lead to more effective diagnosis and treatment. For your sake and that of many other people, I sincerely hope so.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [dev.soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 1) by LAngeOliver on Saturday March 08 2014, @07:41AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @09:43AM
I work for Amgen and one of our drugs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panitumumab) only works on about 40% of the population, but it works really really well. When someone is diagnosed with colorectal cancer, they can test for "non-mutated (wild-type) KRAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KRAS)". If the patient has it, the drug is effective. If not, then they don't use the drug. It's one of the things that Amgen are trying for in future medicines, having them very targeted for specific expressions of cancers, so that you don't have to dose people up with a broad treating drug that has a lower effectiveness.
So it's something that companies are working on already but with so many diseases and cancers you'd end up with 100's of flavours of treatments. It's a tough, but very interesting, business.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Dunbal on Saturday March 08 2014, @08:09AM
I have a much different point of view than OP. While genetics is providing us with tools that are of limited usefulness for screening - limited because they merely indicate statistical genetic susceptibility in most cases, not certainty of disease, there is no sign of actual genetic "cures" of disease, outside of possibly bone marrow transplants which I guess are a type of "gene therapy". In OP's cited example - the genetic test for warfarin tolerance, this has absolutely zero impact on clinical practice and is merely an expensive diversion and another way to bill a patient or his insurance provider. It is entirely possible to anticoagulate and manage a patient without this test with no problems.
Disease will always be with us. Chronic disease more so, as we manage to capture patients before any acute episode actually kills them. Screening everyone for every disease is ridiculous and wasteful however. We all know that death is the eventual outcome in all situations. We are all susceptible to it. While more screening will certainly enrich those who create screening tests, patients should never be treated solely on the result of a genetic test. We don't treat lab results. We don't treat statistical probabilities. We treat PATIENTS. Screening is just another tool in the toolbox, not a magical hammer that suddenly converts every health problem into a nail.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Daniel Dvorkin on Saturday March 08 2014, @02:06PM
Except some number of patients will have problems, especially when you're dealing with something as powerful and dangerous as warfarin, and I wouldn't think you'd want to ignore a source of information that could help you minimize those problems. Are you saying you consider the genetic tests completely useless in this case?
Yes, of course. The entire point is to give clinicians more tools for the toolbox, and specifically tools that can be adapted to individual patients' needs in a way that the current tools often can't be. I don't know of anyone working in the field claiming that genetic screening, or any kind of genomic test, is or ever will be the be-all and end-all of diagnosis and treatment. What I think it's entirely reasonable to expect, however, is an approach that will make the goal of "treating PATIENTS" easier and more effective for everybody involved.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [dev.soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 5, Informative) by Dunbal on Saturday March 08 2014, @02:53PM
"Powerful and dangerous as Warfarin..."
Let me interject - I both am a physician, and I also take warfarin for one of my own health problems. While warfarin certainly can kill when mismanaged, and while it does have a reputation for being fickle, with patient INR's sometimes varying wildly for no apparent reason, and while it is a drug whose bioavailability reacts to almost every other substance you can imagine, it's not half as dangerous or problematic as many people believe. You just have to have a physician who knows what he is doing, and an informed patient who pays attention. But I think that a lot of the "terror" instilled in young medical students and pharmacology students about warfarin is just to ensure that they pay attention. It certainly is no more dangerous than many other drugs - even over the counter drugs. However we humans have a tendency to demonize everything. I've seen patients in agony in ER wards for hours because their physicians are afraid of prescribing and opioid - or even the correct dose of an opioid. Real knowledge about the pros and cons of a therapeutic alternative cannot be substituted for a test, a marker. I can do that empirically for much, much cheaper. And at the end of the day, it's the patient who is paying the bill and who will appreciate me not spending all his money for him.
As for your last paragraph, I was mainly addressing the tone of OP, who in a way seemed to announce that suddenly the magical solution to (insert disease here) was at hand because of genetic markers. "Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat." implying that now we can "effectively treat". I'm saying hold your horses, we might capture more patients and prevent more disease through these tests, but to claim that only now we can "effectively treat" things is a bit of a stretch.
Finally choosing warfarin as an example is probably the worst example - warfarin has many side effects (including tissue necrosis) if started at a high dose. Therefore ALL patients would be titrated over time into a higher dose, no matter what genetic group they fall in. What is the use of a test that tells me I'm going to end up maintaining this guy at 10mg a day instead of 5mg a day if I can do a much cheaper INR after a week or two and notice that the dose needs to be upped a little more? An old adage I remember from medical school: if a test will not change your diagnosis or therapeutic behavior - why order the test?