Title: Learn: Medical Diagnostics
Course: BTEC-1000-301-302-303-F21 > Section: DNA Analysis

Module 4 Medical Diagnostics

Personalized medicine can help predict whether a drug is likely to be effective or have side effects for a particular person, based on that person’s biochemistry or DNA.

In the SNP experiment you performed, your DNA helped you predict whether you can taste PTC. That’s probably not something you really care about, but what about a test that predicts your likelihood of getting cancer? That may change the way you live your life, or allow you to take preventative measures. Actress Angelina Jolie, for example, had a family history of breast and ovarian cancers. Testing of her BRCA1 gene indicated her risk of breast cancer was 87%, and ovarian cancer 50%. To lower those risks, she underwent a preventive bilateral mastectomy, and later had surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes. Other tests available today can help identify which medications a patient is most likely to respond to; this is part of a trend called “personalized medicine”.

Another way DNA can be used in medicine is to identify infectious diseases. Local company BioFire Diagnostics, which hires many SLCC Biotech graduates, makes an innovative product that allows simultaneous testing for numerous pathogens in about an hour. If you have a respiratory infection, for example, the respiratory panel tests for twenty different respiratory pathogens; within an hour, your physician will know which bacteria or viruses are affecting you, and can provide specific treatment. Traditional testing requires culturing the microbes and waiting several days for them to grow in number so that they could be physically identified. Molecular approaches are much faster. Watch the two videos below to learn about how the FilmArray is used, and how it works. It’s not important that you catch the details of how the FilmArray works, but note that it is based on PCR -- which you just did to amplify your own TAS2R38 DNA!

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