10-1-14 medical college grant

MILWAUKEE (AP) — The Medical College of Wisconsin has received a $2.5 million federal grant for genetics research.  The center will use the four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to analyze the genes of patients with undiagnosed diseases. It will work with genetics company Illumina to sequence the genomes of 1,650 patients and their families.  The research will examine whether it is better to search for diagnostic clues by scanning the entire genome or just a specific part, called the exome.  The Medical College and the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin sequenced a 4-year-old’s genes to diagnose his rare intestinal disease using his exome in 2009. The college’s genetics center director says it is hypothesizing a 25 percent greater diagnostic rate with full genome sequencing.