My Letter about genetic testing’s promise in the May 27, 2019 Wall Street Journal:
“A Bigger Body of Research Will Put Gene Studies to Use”
‘Many individuals must be tested in order to identify the small number of people who have disease-causing changes in a given gene.’
As Amy Dockser Marcus suggests in “The Unfulfilled Promise of DNA Testing” (page one, May 18), making sense of the terabytes of information we can obtain from genetic testing is the current frontier in genomic science. This understanding will lead to much broader and more effective use of genetic technologies.
We need to determine how to best utilize genetic information in patient care. We can gain this knowledge only by testing large numbers of people—diseased and well—and correlating their physical conditions with their genetic-test results. This is most important for patients with rare genetic disorders because many individuals must be tested in order to identify the small number of people who have disease-causing changes in a given gene.
Despite the current limitations, thousands of patients with inherited diseases and cancer benefit from appropriately performed genetic testing each year. This is merely the beginning of the genomic medicine revolution.
Roger D. Klein, M.D., J.D.
Cleveland
@RogerDKlein