Zetta Genomics welcomes Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s announcement that every newborn baby in England will have their DNA mapped to assess their risk of hundreds of diseases, under NHS plans for the next 10 years. This is part of a government drive towards predicting and preventing illness, which will also see £650m invested in DNA research for all patients by 2030.
As genomic technologies enable the detection of hundreds of rare conditions, far beyond the current nine tested, this initiative marks a landmark advance as there are approximately 7,000 single-gene disorders, some of which develop in early childhood and for which there are effective treatments.
The Department for Health and Social Care said that genomics – the study of genes – and AI would be used to “revolutionise prevention” and provide faster diagnoses and an “early warning signal for disease”.
Funding for the new initiative will also support efforts by Genomics England to build one of the world’s largest research databases, with the goal of containing over 500,000 genomes by 2030. The main drivers for this study are:
- Identify rare conditions in babies earlier
- Enable Research
- Explore the benefits and risks of storing an individual’s genome over their lifetime
Though it is not without concerns on how such an enormous undertaking would be managed, executed and supported. Prof Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute, cautioned that the government would not only need to hire people to collect the data, but qualified professionals who could interpret it for patients.
“XetaBase will enable more people to analyse this large influx of data,” Ignacio Medina, Zetta’s Founder. “Our platform is intuitive, highly scalable and efficient, which allows healthcare professionals to interpret genomic results accurately, expanding access to precision medicine across the NHS.” We hope that this will allow the expertise of genetic counsellors coupled with the platform’s design and benefits, to provide a powerful combination to understanding even the most complex diagnosis.
Federated infrastructure that can scale today, that’s accessible nationally “Our federated architecture allows for the decentralisation of data and clinical insights allowing institutes to retain full control of their data while also benefiting from the ability to share data securely with other organisations to support enhanced diagnostic success.” explains Mark Hughes, Zetta Genomics CCO. Our platform was engineered for hospitals and clinics across the UK to participate in genomics‑based screening without heavy capital investment, so the NHS can focus on the work, not the costs.
Work at this scale requires future-proofing; “With a new generation of detailed genomic data arriving in bulk, our tools are able to look in depth and at volume to create insights, not just result-handling. With the gift of this sensitive information we must ensure data confidentiality and integrity for information that will follow individuals throughout their lives.” adds Head of Bioinformatics, Marta Bleda Latorre
As Secretary Streeting said, “To fix our broken NHS, we need to ensure the future of healthcare is more predictive, more preventive and more personalised” a goal perfectly aligned with our mission telegraph.co.uk.
