The first white paper in the bipartisan 21st Century Cures initiative asked, “How can we best leverage advances in translational research, health information technology, and communications so that we can collectively ‘connect the dots’ more quickly and start developing potential therapies and cures?" A new partnership between Autism Speaks and Google, MSSNG, exemplifies the opportunities technology can and will provide in finding more cures and treatments.
The Washington Post reports that this partnership is “an effort to sequence the whole genomes of 10,000 people in families affected by autism, and to share the results with researchers around the world on the Google Cloud Platform. It is sort of like digitizing a DNA library."
CNBC adds, “Over the past 10 years, no disorder has become so familiar to Americans, yet remained so mysterious, as autism. … If successful, the $50 million project could not only help doctors understand and treat autism but change the way illnesses are tackled in the 21st century."
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December 8, 2014
If you put 10,000 people’s genomes in the cloud, could you demystify autism?
“The world," the narrator notes in Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," “is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." The novel is a mystery. The narrator is a 15-year-old boy named Christopher John Francis Boone. He is autistic, and he is quoting Sherlock Holmes - who was not speaking about autism, in the original Arthur Conan Doyle story, but perhaps could have been.
For all the strides researchers have made in recent years in understanding the disorder we generally think of as autism - actually, it’s a group of disorders, which collectively affect an estimated one out of 68 children in America - so much of it remains mysterious. Scientists are only beginning to untangle which genetic and environmental factors cause the disorders on the autism spectrum.
But there are clues to autism, and lately, many of them have come from studying what amounts to the mapped DNA of people on the spectrum. A major autism non-profit, backed by a tech giant, is betting there are a lot more breakthroughs where those came from.
On Tuesday, the nonprofit, Autism Speaks, will announce the details of an effort to sequence the whole genomes of 10,000 people in families affected by autism, and to share the results with researchers around the world on the Google Cloud Platform. It is sort of like digitizing a DNA library. The effort is called MSSNG; the dropped vowels are meant to show all the things about autism that no one has yet observed, as Holmes might have put it…
The goal is for that access to produce a sort of crowdsourcing for autism answers. David Glazer, the engineering director at Google, compared it to using Google Translate on a Web page, a process that is powered by patterns detected in human translations of words from one language to another…
Read the full article online HERE.
November 6, 2014
Can Google find the cure for autism?
Over the past 10 years, no disorder has become so familiar to Americans, yet remained so mysterious, as autism.
Now affecting 1 in every 68 children born in the United States-up from 1 in 166 a decade ago-the condition has so far resisted nearly all efforts to cure it, curb it or even precisely define it. As a result, speculation and controversy surrounding the disease has mounted, leaving parents unsure what to believe and doctors frustrated with a lack of options.
But an unusual partnership between science, business and philanthropy may soon provide some answers. Autism Speaks, Google and geneticist Dr. Stephen Scherer have devised an ambitious plan to upload the complete genomes of 10,000 autistic patients and their families to a cloud database that will be searchable, sortable and shareable with researchers around the world. The plan, known as the Autism Speaks Ten Thousands Genome Program-or AUT10K-aims to harness the combined power of big data, crowdsourcing and genetic know-how to isolate the causes of autism and find new genetic targets for treatment.
If successful, the $50 million project could not only help doctors understand and treat autism but change the way illnesses are tackled in the 21st century….
Read the full article online HERE.
