Rady Children’s, Project Baby Bear provided diagnoses for 76 babies (43%) of those tested with rWGS. The testing led to a change in the management of 55 babies (31%) that resulted in fewer hospital days, fewer procedures or new therapies.
A pilot project aimed at extending rapid DNA-based diagnosis to infants with severe, but unexplained symptoms found answers for 76 different families across five California hospitals, according to a new report to be released by Rady Children’s Hospital today.
When babies become intensely ill, it can be difficult to know what has gone wrong. But the answer, quite often, is hidden somewhere in their genes. Whole-genome sequencing — in which scientists can read the nearly 3 billion chemical letters in DNA — can help turn up that answer. And scientists, increasingly, are laying out […]
Daily vitamin doses were all that 11-month-old Maverick Coltrin needed to end the deadly seizures that arrived shortly after his birth. But that simple solution materialized only after quick-turnaround genetic sequencing helped doctors at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego find the correct diagnosis fast enough to make a difference for the rapidly-deteriorating infant.
Looking to spread the success it has achieved in fast genomic screening of severely ill newborns, Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego is leveraging $2 million in funding from Medi-Call to launch Project Baby Bear, the first California State funded program to offer rapid whole genome sequencing (WGS) for critically-ill newborns.
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