Neutrophil extracellular traps

Coming soon to a doctor’s surgery near you? Hopes placed on the sequencing of ‘the’ human genome and the subsequent identification of many single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have turned out to be misguided, as the causes of common diseases like cancer and heart disease have proven too complex to be addressed with simple SNP searches. Also, large-scale genomic differences like copy number variations (CNV) and insertions/deletions (indels) are now known to be equally important as SNPs, rendering the quest for genomic answers to medical problems ever more challenging. There is, however, the hope that large-scale analysis of individual genomes may yield some of the answers that SNPs failed to provide. And the rapid progress in sequencing technology, with the costs dropping more rapidly than those of computer technology (still following Moore’s Law), means that comparing thousands of individual genomes, thoughtfully chosen by epidemiological criteria, is now a perfectly viable approach to medical genomics. At the more individual level, affordable genome analysis is also bound to aid diagnosis and therapy, especially in cancer. Soon it will be easy to compare the genome of a tumour with that of the patient’s healthy cells, enabling doctors to find out both what went wrong and what treatment is most likely to succeed. And this, when it happens, will be the real genome revolution.