Genetic Test Firm to Put Customers’ Data in Public Domain

The New York Times

 The 10,000 people all have or have had breast or ovarian cancer and were tested by Ambry to see if they have genetic variants that increase the risk of those diseases. Ambry returned to the samples from those customers and, at its own expense, sequenced their exomes — the roughly 1.5 percent of a person’s genome that contains the recipes for the proteins produced by the body.

AmbryShare will not contain the actual exome of each person, because that would pose a risk to patient privacy. Rather it will contain aggregated data on the genetic variants.

 

Specialists welcomed Ambry’s move, but some said it was unclear how useful the information will be. The Exome Aggregation Consortium, an academic collaboration based at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, already has a similar publicly available database containing information from more than 60,000 exomes.

“It is not clear to me that 10,000 exomes changes the game much,” said David B. Goldstein, professor of genetics at Columbia University.