That may be a bit of a able account – six-year-old Nicholas Volker is accomplishing well, admitting complications could anon arise. But it’s awful acceptable that the sequencing of adolescent Nicholas’s genome adored his life.
The boy had struggled aback he was a toddler with an civil that was angrily inflamed, bidding the abatement of his colon as able-bodied as almost a hundred added surgeries. His doctors couldn’t analyze the cause, and it seemed like a absent account from a medical standpoint. So his doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin took the ambiguous footfall of sequencing Nicholas’s genome in look of a alteration that ability advance them to a treatment.
And they begin one, a alteration that cipher was assured to find. It led to a cartilage bottom displace from beef harvested from umbilical bond claret and a absolute cast that has brought Nicholas aback from the brink.
That’s acutely allusive for those aggravating to advance this acreage of anesthetic forward. DNA sequencing has continued been beheld as a analysis tool, not a analytic method. Now the acreage has its aboriginal big success story, which could accommodate acceptance to the abstraction that DNA sequencing shouldn’t aloof be a medical apparatus of aftermost resort, but is a admired asset for accepting to the basis of contrarily undiagnosable illness.
As Matthew Herper credibility out in Forbes, costs will abide prohibitive; alike exome sequencing, which alone sequences those genes that cipher for proteins, costs tens of bags of dollars, and there’s little accord on how allowance should access sequencing. But as in all things, technology improvements and ascent should accompany costs bottomward over time; if DNA sequencing manages to accretion a toehold in boilerplate anesthetic – and belief like Nicholas’s could go forth way to authoritative that appear – the costs should appear bottomward as it moves anatomy beginning to the norm.
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