Find out about how the 100,000 Genomes Project is changing how NHS patients are treated and cared for at a special event at Salford Royal on Tuesday 6 December.
Your genome is the instructions for making and maintaining you. It is all 3.2 billion letters of your DNA and contains around 20,000 genes.
Salford Royal will be a site for the project, which will sequence (read the DNA of) 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people – NHS patients with a rare disease, plus their families, and patients with cancer.
Learning more about genomes can help us to identify the cause of genetic diseases.
Some rare diseases are caused by as little as a single change (variant), like a spelling mistake, in someone’s DNA. Looking at the genome of a person affected by a rare disease can help find which DNA changes might be causing the problem.
In cancer, the tumour cells have developed a different genome to the healthy cells. Comparing the normal and cancer genomes may give clues about ways to treat the cancer.
It’s hoped the 100,000 Genomes Project will mean patients may be offered a diagnosis where there wasn’t one before. In time, there is the potential of new and more effective treatments.
The project will also enable new medical research, including investigations into the causes, diagnosis and treatment of disease. It is looking into nearly 200 rare diseases and some common cancers – including breast, lung, ovarian, prostate, brain, bladder and colorectal cancers. Eligible patients who have a rare disease or cancer will be asked to take part by their hospital doctor or nurse.
This is currently the largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world and so far it has sequenced nearly 15,000 genomes.
If you’d like to find out more, come along to the Genome Café in Hope Building on Tuesday 6 December between 10am and 2.30pm.