Stephen Quake, Stanford University, USA

Is the Genome Useful in Medicine?
We are living in the genome age: enormous technological advances in DNA analysis have enabled the decoding of a large number of genomes. While the science of understanding genomes has advanced by leaps and bounds, some have questioned whether the impact on medicine has been commensurate. I will describe recent work in our group which has combined fundamental questions about the nature of the genome and how to measure it with efforts to develop clinical applications in areas as diverse as non-invasive prenatal diagnostics, the intersection between the microbiome and human health, and characterizing the state of the immune system.