January 15, 2012
Lane Center Faculty Team With Ion Torrent to Develop Open Source Software to Interpret Personal Genomic Information
Ion Torrent announced a new generation of sequencing instrument that will enable sequencing of a personal genome for $1,000. This will dramatically increase the number of individual genomes available for finding associations between sequence and disease, and Ion Torrent also announced that they are sponsoring a collaborative effort with the Lane Center to develop open-source software to help clinicians interpret personal genome sequences. Collaborators at Baylor College of Medicine and Yale Medical School will obtain genome sequences and clinical parameters to help train the system.
“The huge variation in human genome sequence between individuals has always been an obstacle to understanding how to use sequence information to improve human health,” said Dr. Robert F. Murphy, director of the Lane Center for Computational Biology in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, who will lead the multidisciplinary CMU team. “We believe new machine learning approaches will enable interpretation of personal genome sequences to help doctors diagnose and guide treatment in the near future.”