Home » The Daily Scan

Technologies on Their Last Breath?

January 07, 2010

Sage Bionetworks’ Stephen Friend lists at Xcomony five technologies that he thinks “will be relegated to museum displays in the next five (OK, maybe 10) years.” That list includes genome-wide association studies, proteomics as an “end approach” to studying disease, and “hunter-gatherer approaches” in which researchers collect clinical and genomic data from a large group, such as the Framingham cohort, to analyze themselves. Regarding GWAS, Friend writes that “single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) analysis isn’t going to last long as a major driver of biologic insight. Within the next one to two years, people will wake up to ‘ITEGS’— ‘It’s the entire genome, stupid.’” At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe looks the list over. “I think the list is mostly correct,” he writes.

I don't think anyone

Submitted by captaindory on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 16:15.

I don't think anyone considers a single SNP in a GWAS study to be the answer to solving a disease (except in rare cases) and this kind of condescending hype type speak doesn't help anyone. Of course it's the whole genome (along with the environment) and always has been, even before it was sequenced and mined, that's plain basic common sense. Did you just figure it out?

If the SNP analysis by GWAS

Submitted by hallypot on Fri, 01/08/2010 - 03:17.

If the SNP analysis by GWAS can't help to solving disease,what else methods can do?

The human biological system

Submitted by xingpengjiang on Fri, 01/15/2010 - 16:19.

The human biological system is so complex, thus it seems we are too optimistic on try to solve disease using genetic methods.