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Could an effort to gather genetic data from its population of one billion people help India take the lead in advanced healthcare?
India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality - and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world's population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases.
In a similar vein, 81% of the world's genomic information has been collected from people with European ancestry. Still, this is an improvement from a staggering 96% back in 2009.
At the same time, there's a growing interest in developing new, more effective therapies tailored to an individual's genetic makeup - an idea known as precision or personalised medicine.
Missing out on mapping worldwide genetic diversity is a big mistake, according to Sumit Jamuar, chief executive of Global Gene Corp.
It's a company aiming to democratise healthcare by capturing anonymised genetic data from populations around the world and share it with the global community of academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. It will start by focusing on populations in South Asia.
Khan Noonien Singh's name was scrupulously scrubbed from the proposal.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 25 2017, @02:28AM
No curry, just Haskell. That makes code taste bad and computer not wanting it ;)