Bhat's Notes

Genome guru who is helping perceive how genomes help connect the dots of building blocks of life itself. Interplay of four alphabets ATCG.

My grand father died when I was three year old. My dad at 40. Many think “I wish I changed my habits before I got that disease.”

Only 10 years ago we started used Google maps for traffic congestion. Can we do the same for health care? Predictive genomics do for you.

Genes are basic functional units of life. In the book of life, we got 23 pairs of chapters that correspond to chromosomes. Paragraphs are like little genes put together. Sentences are genes. Each gene has start and finish.

Letters in the genome got A, C, T and G. This is an opportunity to able to look at our own instruction manual. Understanding and decoding our genome is very good exhilarating.

Global diversity in genome is what makes how we react to a drug or a desease.

We might have differences in our snips. Sometimes these snips make no diffeence at all. There are few observable snips that can distinguish one from another. You can reconstruct an entire face from DNA. Snips not only result in observable things but also play in how we react to a drug.

25% of the medicines in USA are personalized where they mentio about the genomes that those medicines would work better on.

80% of our deaths are from life style diseases and hence are preventable. Can we predict such deaths and prevent them? What genomics do here?

First thing that came is Janam Patri. We started to call it genome patri. Consumers think it is very complicated process. All you need is a little swab. Once you have it, brush your teeth with it and ship it back to us. We extract the DNA from it. We pick the part of genomes of interest. It gives interesting things about you.

Are you likely to be an alcoholic? Or coffee or memory. We can also tell whether certain drugs can work for you or not. It also talks about risk of particular kind of desease. We give you relative risk compared to other Indians.

We will have a generic counselor to work with you to correlate your life style with the report. It lets you find what are the things to prevent, what are the things you should do to delay the desease.

Some use cases to share.

High risk for asthma. On counseling, she told the same about her mother’s condition with asthma. She thought she wouldn’t have it.

We did a subset of genome patri. We started her to get attracted. Then we did the rest. Then we found she was already at breath cancer onset.

If you have the propensity of this, we can predict.

Same with diabetes.

Most of the deseases are preventable. We give credit to Angelina Jolie. She started this awareness.

See Gattaca movie. Are we at where the trailer said a single drop of blood or saliva can tell who you are and whom you marry. This movie imagined 30 years ago.

Can predictive Genomics reduce India’s Healthcare burden by 60%? I think so. It has come from 200 millions to Rs.10000 rupees now. It is getting there.

A, C, T and G are building blocks. According to my definition, ACTG stands for “Action Changed Things.”