Genomic tools being tried at a handful of children's hospitals may foreshadow changes to pediatric care, US News and World Report says.
"Clearly we're at an early pioneering stage of using genome information with children," Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine's Stephen Kingsmore tells it.
For instance, US News and World Report reports that investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are examining the genomes of pediatric cancer patients. Based on their analyses, James Downing, the president and CEO of St. Jude's, tells US News and World Report researchers there have made strides in understanding disease that have helped them to better diagnose and risk-stratify disease.
At the same time, St. Louis Children's Hospital researchers are performing trio sequencing of children and their parents to study structural birth defects and Rady researchers are testing newborns in the intensive care unit for thousands of genetic disorders.
Kingsmore further tells US News and World Report that if his researchers' broad approach were extended to all pediatric ICU patients in San Diego that they'd diagnose some 150 patients with treatable disease.