NY Times:Insurance Fears Lead Many to Shun DNA Tests (posted by Scott)

THE DNA AGE

Insurance Fears Lead Many to Shun DNA Tests

Victoria Grove wanted to find out if she was destined to develop the form ofemphysema that ran in her family, but she did not want to ask her doctor for the DNA test that would tell her.

She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her.

Nor did she tell her doctor when the test revealed that she was virtually certain to get it. Knowing that she could sustain permanent lung damage without immediate treatment for her bouts of pneumonia, she made sure to visit her clinic at the first sign of infection.

But then came the day when the nurse who listened to her lungs decided she just had a cold. Ms. Grove begged for a chest X-ray. The nurse did not think it was necessary.

“It was just an ongoing battle with myself,” recalled Ms. Grove, of Woodbury, Minn. “Should I tell them now or wait till I’m sicker?”

The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.

In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast andcolon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.

Here's the rest:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html?ref=health

CF severity and Epistasis

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2008) — Cystic fibrosis (CF), a hereditary disorder causing thick mucous production and frequent lung infections, is associated with a high mortality rate primarily due to lung failure.


Although it is known that mutations in the CFTR gene cause the disease, variations in other genes between individuals with CF modify the severity of the disease. For example, the gene responsible for making the MBL2 protein has been suggested to modify lung function in individuals with CF; however, its precise roles in the disease have not been well understood.

the article can be found here

First order for pet dog cloning (posted by Luke)

A South Korean company says it has taken its first order for the cloning of a pet dog.
A woman from the United States wants her dead pitbull terrier - called Booger - re-created.

RNL Bio is charging the woman, from California, $150,000 (£76,000) to clone the pitbull using tissue extracted from its ear before it died.

The work will be carried out by a team from Seoul National University, where the first dog was cloned in 2005.

Commercial cloning

RNL Bio says this is the first time a dog will have been cloned commercially.

"There are many people who want to clone their pet dogs in Western countries even at this high price," company chief executive, Ra Jeong-chan, told the Korea Times.


The cost of cloning a dog may come down to less than $50,000
Cho Seong-Ryul, RNL Bio

The firm is expecting hundreds more orders for pets over the next few years and also plans to clone dogs trained to sniff out bombs or drugs.

One out of every four surrogate mother dogs produces puppies, according to RNL Bio's marketing director, Cho Seong-ryul.

"The cost of cloning a dog may come down to less than $50,000 as cloning is becoming an industry," he said.

Dog attack

The pitbull's owner, Bernann McKunney, gave the company ear tissue, which an American biotech firm preserved before the animal died 18 months ago.


An Afghan hound was the first dog cloned by the SNU team

She is said to have been particularly attached to the dog, after it saved her life when another dog attacked her and bit off her arm.

The university's team is led by Professor Lee Byeong-chun, who was previously in a team headed by the disgraced stem cell scientist, Hwang Woo-suk.

Mr Hwang's results on cloning human stem cells, initially hailed as a breakthrough, were found to have been falsified and he is now on trial charged with embezzlement and fake research.

But the team did succeed in creating the world's first cloned dog two years ago - an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

They continued with the programme, cloning more dogs and also producing clones of Korean grey wolves.

Ten new genetic clues for prostate cancer (submited by Jillian)

Ten new genetic clues for prostate cancer

1 hour ago

PARIS (AFP) — Gene sleuths on Sunday announced they had identified more than 10 new genetic links to prostate cancer, two of which would be included in a new diagnostic test aimed at spotting men at risk from this disease.

Prostate cancer is the commonest cancer afflicting men in developed countries and heredity is known to play a key but poorly understood role in it.

Working separately, scientists gathered in three international consortia crunched through genetic data garnered from blood samples provided by thousands of volunteers.

Men with prostate cancer had a strong tendency to have telltale variants in locations on chromosomes 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 19 and the X chromosome for gender, they reported in the latest issue of Nature Genetics.

One of the group of investigators worked in Iceland, trawling over a local DNA treasure trove.

Two of the genetic variants, on the X chromosome and chromosome 2, would be included in a new lab test for prostate cancer, they said.

The new diagnostic tool, called deCODE PrCa, would look for a total of eight such signatures, said deCODE genetics, a biopharmaceutical company that is looking through the Icelandic DNA data in the search for new medical products.

Researcher Gilles Thomas, who took part in a study by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that, individually, the genetic variants "play a low-key part" in prostate cancer, but became more dangerous when they accumulated.

"It's being able to spot several variants at one time that we can start helping people who are at high risk," he told AFP.

Men with close relatives who have had prostate cancer are twice as likely to develop the disease as counterparts with no recent family history of this ailment.

But, until now, only a few genes have been associated with the disease, and they account for only a small percentage of potential cases.

No. 1 at making babies? Third cousins (Submitted by Arash)

No. 1 at making babies? Third cousins
At least, that's what's happening with Icelanders

By ELIZABETH LOPATTO
Bloomberg News

Couples with the same great-great-grandparents have more children than those who aren't as closely related, according to an Icelandic study.

Married third cousins on average had one more child and two more grandchildren than distantly related couples, according to an analysis of Icelandic families in the last two centuries published in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science.

Inbreeding produces children with more birth defects, so the authors said they couldn't explain the biological reason the related couples cousins have more babies. Previous research didn't examine fertility in relatives more distant than third cousins, according to the study by Iceland-based DeCode Genetics, which is developing drugs based on genetics.

"Our assumption was that the more distantly related, the more children a couple would have," said lead study author Kari Stefansson, DeCode's chief executive officer, in a telephone interview. "But nature has its ways of surprising us."

Parents who were second cousins or closer had fewer children than third-cousin couples, the study found.

Stefansson and his co-authors focused on Iceland because the population's education, wealth and status varies little and because most people descended from a few founders. Similar studies in other parts of the world have been difficult to interpret because of the population variables, said the article.

A study last year found that brother and sister fish known as cichlids inbreed so they'll have cooperative relationships raising their young, scientists from the University of Bonn said.

In humans, unrelated parents can have different blood rhesus factors, which can complicate pregnancy and nursing, according to the Mayo Clinic's Web site. Parental kinship decreases the chance for that incompatibility, Stefansson said.

"I found this observation not particularly attractive," Stefansson said. "Though the definition of a species are individuals who are closely enough related to be able to reproduce, the idea that the individuals are related is inherent."