Full genome sequencing may avoid diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or heart disease by allowing the embryo to choose the lower risk of developing them. There are those who warn of increasing stigmatization of these diseases.
The way pregnancies are planned and the conceived children will never be the same, thanks to Full genome sequencing.
This is the belief of The CEO of the Orchid Biotechnology company, Noor Siddiqui, and the Harvard Medical School’s geneticist George Church. In the future, in vitro fertilization (IVF) combined with the genetic screening of embryos may become the standard method for having children.
Orchid offers complete sequencing tests of Embryos created by IVF, which allows us to analyze DNA before deployment and choose the embryo with a lower risk of developing hereditary diseases.
The world of pregnancy will change radically, predicts Noor Siddiqui. “I believe the standard way people will choose to have children will be through in vitro fertilization and embryonic screening,” the CEO said in the Health Summit: “There is a huge risk that can be discarded.”
It is currently estimated that about 4% of the world’s population suffers from diseases caused by unique (monogenic) genetic mutations. In addition, about half of the world’s population deals with partial genetic -based chronic diseases.
With embryonic screening, “these monogenic diseases can be completely avoided,” said Siddiqui.
Analysis of five embryos prior to the implementation of one may reduce the genetic risk of these diseases between 30% and 80%depending on the cases, says the company. Effectiveness depends on several factors, such as the prevalence of the disease and the amount of genetic variants analyzed.
Church, which invests in orchid, considers technology one of the most cost-effective ever. Ensures that the cost of sequencing a genome has dropped dramatically, being in “Thousands of dollars per embryo”. For Church, this technology can have a ten -time investment return, with the potential to reduce a large share of health costs, psychological problems and family conflicts.
Siddiqui revealed that he used technology to track his own embryos. Your mother was blinded in adulthood due to a genetic variation, but none of the embryos showed this mutation.
Monogenic diseases such as hereditary blindness have no treatment in 95% of cases. Complex diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or heart disease result from multiple genetic variants (polygenic diseases). For these, orchid calculates genetic risk scores that estimate the likelihood of future development of the disease, both in adults and embryos.
On the other side of the coin, critics fear that selecting embryos based on genetic scores can stigmatize disease and approach forms of eugeniabesides being currently an expensive and accessible technology. Another challenge is that the sequence also brings uncertainties: Church, whose genome was sequenced, revealed to have high dyslexia, narcolepsy and high cholesterol, but not all these conditions were evidenced in its DNA.
