Today I took an arterial blood sample from a patient. As soon as I had it in a bag on ice it was sent up a transfer chute to a lab. The blood gas analysis was back in 15 minutes.
That’s not bad when you have a patient hyperventilating and his desperate wife asking you to do something. Yet within a few years I will be able, in the same 15 minutes, to gather 9 billion base pairs of information from any patient’s DNA. Using this DNA sequence I might predict a range of health concerns, both present and future, as well as tailor medications specifically for that patient. This kind of information is the dream goal of personalized medicine.
This dream is being made possible with the SMRTTM technology developed by Pacific Biosciences. For anyone that has spent hours, or even years, slaving away at DNA sequncing machine- this will blow your mind. It is also a useful comparison to remember that it took 13 years to first sequence the human genome.
I believe this to be a humbling moment for humanity. It is even more humbling for me as some 8 years ago I made a bet with a classmate that the human genome would never be sequenced this rapidly. He replied, “didn’t people once say that man would never walk on the moon?”
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Future Health Analyst 
If you take the ABG straight to the machine, you can have it back in < 2 minutes – was this ABG necessary?
CRF
[…] – something that DNA arrays initially promised, but never really delivered. I’ve previously written on this topic, but every month new astounding results come out of cutting edge labs that herald a new era in […]