A Medical Device Daily

Timothy Triche, MD, PhD, has been awarded $1.05 million by the U.S. Department of the Army to implement next generation gene sequencing to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of high-risk childhood cancer. Triche is director of the Center for Personalized Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

“With this award we will develop the infrastructure to create a center for precision medicine to enable genomic profiling of life-threatening disease in children and young adults,“ Triche said.

Current genomic technology has provided invaluable insights into the genetic basis of cancer and other serious illnesses. However, these methods are limited in their ability to provide an integrated, detailed view of the underlying genetics in a clinical setting due to their cost and lengthy time to completion, often measured in months.

“We plan to establish a next generation whole genome characterization core facility at Children's Hospital Los Angeles that utilizes newly available sequencing technology that can detect even the smallest change in a patient's DNA or RNA,“ Triche said. “Most importantly, rapid advances in the underlying technology, coupled with extraordinary decreases in the cost, now make it feasible to apply this technology to actual patient samples and derive useful information in days instead of weeks or months, as was the case until recently. These integrated, detailed genomic profiles can provide unprecedented insight into the fundamental properties of diseases like cancer, where even a small variation is enough to promote disease.“

This facility will be the first genomic profiling center using so-called “next generation“ genome sequencing to study diseases of the young.