SAN JOSE, Calif. – A Silicon Valley company has designed a technique to decipher the genetic code of a tiny embryo and calculate its future risk of cancer, diabetes and 10 other common diseases – presaging a day when parents could select children with a greater chance of living a healthier life.
“Some parents are really worried about a specific disease in their family,” said pediatric medical geneticist Dr. Akash Kumar, co-founder of MyOme, a Menlo Park-based genome sequencing company. “Our hope is that by providing information relevant to the diseases that they care about, they can feel like they’re more empowered.”
For now, this powerful and potentially life-tinkering advance is still in the research phase and only applies to embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF), not ones naturally conceived. But if it becomes commercially available, it could relieve the burden on families and health systems, by reducing the number of people born at risk of those illnesses. Kumar’s team reported its findings in the March 21 issue of the journal Nature Medicine.
