Ready or Not, Genomics is Coming to a Hospital Near You
Luke Timmerman reports on the leap genomics has taken from academic research and big pharma to patient care in hospitals and clinics and how Knome is responding to this new demand.
Excerpt:
Like Foundation Medicine, Knome is also seeing demand grow from doctors. Some of the country’s leading institutions, like the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and MD Anderson Cancer Center are making aggressive pushes to incorporate genomic screening into care of cancer patients. Without an active marketing effort, Knome CEO Martin Tolar says his company has had inbound requests from 50 different hospitals that want to start sequencing patients’ genomes, and who need help from software to interpret these massive files with 6 billion DNA data points per person.
It’s not just Mayo and Hopkins, he says, but also regional hospital systems in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere. Some of the hospitals are thinking big, about analyzing thousands or tens of thousands of genomes per year, Tolar says.
To deal with the surge in demand, Knome is rolling out a new version of its software this week specifically for clinicians, mainly for those who treat cancer patients and genetic disorders in children.
“It has been incredible, like a firestorm,” Tolar says. “Last fall, I thought it would be 3-5 years before the clinics would be ready for that. They are saying to us they want it now.”