By Adrian Thorogood,
If every individual has millions of unique variants in their DNA, how can clinicians be expected to tease out a handful of disease causing mutations from a haystack of inconsequential variants? To aid their cause, public human genomic variant databases have sprung up to catalog variants that cause (or do not cause) disease. These databases aggregate, curate and share data from research publications and from clinical sequencing laboratories who have identified a “pathogenic”, “unknown” or “benign” variant when testing a patient.
International sharing of variant data is “crucial” to improving human health. To inform patient diagnosis or treatment, it is essential that data be accurate and up to date. If variants are collaboratively interpreted by laboratories, databases and treating physicians, who is ultimately responsible for the quality of data? If one actor in the chain does a shoddy job of interpreting variants, resulting in harm to patients, who could be liable? This is the question I pose with Professors Bartha Knoppers and Robert Cook-Deegan in a recent article in Genetics and Medicine: “Public Variant Databases: Liability?”. Read More