World Pregnancy will change radically, Noor Siddiqui predicts. “I think that the default way that people decide to have children is to review IVF and Embery,” she said on Wired health Summit last week. “There is only a huge risk that you can remove the table.”
Siddiqui is the founder and general director of Orchid, a biotechnology company that offers embryos survey in IVF. Analyzing the DNA of various embryos before choosing the one who says to the implant, orchid says, parents can reduce the risk that their children grow up, affected by conditions with the genetic principle. Siddiqui talked to George Church-Pioner Genomiki and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School-at the summit in Boston, examining the promise and the potential of sequencing the entire genome.
Some estimated 4 percent of people around the world have a disease caused by a single genetic mutation. Thanks to the study of the embryos, “these monogenic diseases can simply be completely avoided,” said Siddiqui. In addition, about half of the world population suffers from a chronic disease with at least certain genetic principles. Siddiqui said that analyze five embryos before the implantation of one, and “you can now alleviate the genetic component of this risk by these double -digit numbers. You are talking about the worst case 30 percent and in the best case to 80 percent.” (You can watch the session in the video below; at the beginning there is a problem with the Noor Siddiqui microphone, which is set around a 6-minute character.)
ORCHID website that reference The statistical analysis of how much risk reduction can be achieved by embryo screening, explains that a thorough reduction in relative risk will depend on a number of factors. These include, among others, how common disease is, the number of embryos analyzed and how much influence of genetic variants of the tested on the probability of developing the disease.
Church is an investor in Orchid and believes that the type of embryo review he offers is one of the most profitable medical technologies ever created. The design of the human genome, the first effort of mapping all human genes, cost $ 3 billion, but since then the cost of sequencing genome has dropped dramatically. Sequencing of the entire Orchid genome costs several thousand dollars per embryo. This is “maybe a 10-fold return on investment,” says Church. “A huge part of our healthcare costs, mental problems and family problems can be solved by this method.”
Siddiqui used this technology to check its own embryos. She shared the history of her mother, who experienced blindness for adults as a result of the genetic variability of her genome. “Fortunately, all embryos are negative for this,” she said. “But another thing that is quite common in most South Asia families is an extremely high risk of heart and diabetes. This is a really different thing in which the priority is.”
The blindness described by Siddiqui is monogenic, which means that it was caused only by one genetic variability. Among the well -known diseases, “95 percent have no treatment, let alone medicine,” said Siddiqui. But many other states – such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or heart disease – is polygenic, driven by the cumulative effect of many genetic variants. To this end, genetic risk results can quantitatively determine the risk of potential development of the disease and can be calculated for both adults and embryos. Orchid embryos tests are looking for both types of diseases.