Gene technology contributes more to medical field

The more humans understand genes, the higher demands modern medical mode calls for. Taking lung cancer as an example, it is one of the most common malignant tumors in the world and it has become the first cause of death in China's urban population. Among them, non-small cell lung cancer accounts for about 80% of all lung cancer; about 75% of patients are found in the advanced stage and 5-year survival rate is very low. In the 1960s, doctors relied mainly on cytotoxic therapy to treat patients, and the response rate is less than 5%; in 2003, scientists found that EGFR is an important pathogenic factor and switched to target drug gefitinib, improving the efficiency to 10%; in 2005, scientists discovered EGFR mutation is a sensitive marker, and the sensitive populations includes Asian women who do not smoke, accounting 14% of the total number, improving the targeted drug efficiency to 70% to 80% and life extended by 30 months. This is based on molecular typing of individualized drug therapy.

The successful development of drugs targeting allows us to get into the precise medical era. People can conduct prevention or treatment of certain diseases according to their genetic characteristics. In the past two years, some parts of China began to popularize hearing screening of newborns. For the SLC26A4 gene-carried children, their parents need to be careful not to let children participate in strenuous physical activity and strictly prevent head injury. While children carrying mitochondrial gene A1555G are often in high-risk groups of "a needle deafness". Inflammation or taking gentamicin and other aminoglycoside will cause deafness to them. Previously, many children had to bear the pain of deafness due to unconsciousness of the condition, but now the genome sequencing allows us to avoid the recurrence of the tragedy.

Michael Snyder from Stanford University School of Medicine found that his risk of suffering from type Ⅱ diabetes is very high during the study, although he didn't have related symptoms at that time. He did suffer from type Ⅱ diabetes before long. But because it was discovered in time, the disease got a good control. Similarly, US actress Angelina Jolie is also a beneficiary of genetic testing. Because her family has a genetic history of breast and ovarian cancer, so she resolutely made breast and ovarian surgery.

Gene sequencing used to be a dream which comes true now. In the future, gene technology will go further and even play a role in the food safety aspects. The food can be traced for both food source and whether or not the food's contents match the gene label. People can also judge what on earth it is, whether it is harmful or not and whether it is a protected species. Gene will probably change the way we learn.

Know more about gene sequencing and life science here: http://www.cusabio.com/Clone/SE1153-1089575.html