Translating translational medicine into global health equity: What is needed?

While genomics, and other omics, research is rapidly advancing in the US and Europe, progress has been slower in less resourced countries. The imbalance has given rise to concern about whether the benefits of these advances, namely new and better tests, treatments, risk identification, and prevention strategies, will be shared and available to those living in less resourced reaches of the globe. In effort to give voice to researchers, an informal survey about barriers to advancing translational medicine was administered to attendees of the 11th Asia Pacific Conference on Human Genetics, 2015, Hanoi. The overall goal of the survey was to identify unmet needs and rank their importance. Most attendees completed the survey. Not surprisingly funding is indicated as a major need. Respondents reported that lack of bioinformatics and computational tools, trained data scientists and access to datasets is creating a significant lag behind better resourced regions. Results are intended to inform efforts to create a regional consensus statement of need. Such a regional statement could help funding organizations and policy makers seeking to promote global genomics benefit sharing.

How to catch all those mutations--the report of the third Human Variome Project Meeting, UNESCO Paris, May 2010

The third Human Variome Project (HVP) Meeting "Integration and Implementation" was held under UNESCO Patronage in Paris, France, at the UNESCO Headquarters May 10-14, 2010. The major aims of the HVP are the collection, curation, and distribution of all human genetic variation affecting health. The HVP has drawn together disparate groups, by country, gene of interest, and expertise, who are working for the common good with the shared goal of pushing the boundaries of the human variome and collaborating to avoid unnecessary duplication. The meeting addressed the 12 key areas that form the current framework of HVP activities: Ethics; Nomenclature and Standards; Publication, Credit and Incentives; Data Collection from Clinics; Overall Data Integration and Access-Peripheral Systems/Software; Data Collection from Laboratories; Assessment of Pathogenicity; Country Specific Collection; Translation to Healthcare and Personalized Medicine; Data Transfer, Databasing, and Curation; Overall Data Integration and Access-Central Systems; and Funding Mechanisms and Sustainability. In addition, three societies that support the goals and the mission of HVP also held their own Workshops with the view to advance disease-specific variation data collection and utilization: the International Society for Gastrointestinal Hereditary Tumours, the Micronutrient Genomics Project, and the Neurogenetics Consortium.

Practical guidelines addressing ethical issues pertaining to the curation of human locus-specific variation databases (LSDBs)

More than 1,000 Web-based locus-specific variation databases (LSDBs) are listed on the Website of the Human Genetic Variation Society (HGVS). These individual efforts, which often relate phenotype to genotype, are a valuable source of information for clinicians, patients, and their families, as well as for basic research. The initiators of the Human Variome Project recently recognized that having access to some of the immense resources of unpublished information already present in diagnostic laboratories would provide critical data to help manage genetic disorders. However, there are significant ethical issues involved in sharing these data worldwide. An international working group presents second-generation guidelines addressing ethical issues relating to the curation of human LSDBs that provide information via a Web-based interface. It is intended that these should help current and future curators and may also inform the future decisions of ethics committees and legislators. These guidelines have been reviewed by the Ethics Committee of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO). Hum Mutat 31:–6, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Planning the human variome project: the Spain report

The remarkable progress in characterizing the human genome sequence, exemplified by the Human Genome Project and the HapMap Consortium, has led to the perception that knowledge and the tools (e.g., microarrays) are sufficient for many if not most biomedical research efforts. A large amount of data from diverse studies proves this perception inaccurate at best, and at worst, an impediment for further efforts to characterize the variation in the human genome. Because variation in genotype and environment are the fundamental basis to understand phenotypic variability and heritability at the population level, identifying the range of human genetic variation is crucial to the development of personalized nutrition and medicine. The Human Variome Project (HVP; http://www.humanvariomeproject.org/) was proposed initially to systematically collect mutations that cause human disease and create a cyber infrastructure to link locus specific databases (LSDB). We report here the discussions and recommendations from the 2008 HVP planning meeting held in San Feliu de Guixols, Spain, in May 2008.

GENETICS. The Human Variome Project

An ambitious plan to collect, curate, and make accessible information on genetic variations affecting human health is beginning to be realized.

Genetic discrimination and screening for hemochromatosis: then and now

Any two people on earth, save for identical twins, share in common roughly 99.9% of their genetic make-up. That 0.1% difference represents not just what, on a molecular level, distinguishes us from one another, but also has reportedly served as a basis for excluding individuals from insurance, employment, adoption, educational opportunities, family relations, as well as perceived life options. The first federal study of genetic discrimination, discrimination based on genotype as opposed to phenotype, included treated hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) as one of only five genotypes possibly providing a basis for discrimination. HH was selected because if a successfully treated condition that is nonetheless genetic but which, if properly managed, leaves affected individuals at no greater morbidity or mortality risk than the general population, then genotype independent of phenotype apparently provided a basis for exclusions. Since the publication of those results, much more is known about the genotypic and phenotypic variation of affected individuals. This paper discusses what is presently known about HH and genetic discrimination.