Canada has passed a Genetic Nondiscrimination bill. Insurance groups opposed it. So did PM Justin Trudeau, saying it impinges on Provinces’ rights to regulate the insurance industry.

Meanwhile, a US House Committee approved a bill that will enable companies to inflict financial penalties on employees who do not submit to genetic tests, thus undermining GINA’s (Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act) ability to protect the genetic data of employees. Employees who refuse testing for “workplace wellness” programs will face reduced pay, fines, or inflated insurance premiums. Tom Price, the HHS Secretary, has said there would be “significant concerns” about the bill, and that they’d be taking a look at it when it got to the department.

The Personalized Medicine Coalition has published a report on current opportunities/challenges.

On the opportunity:

• Percentage of the patient population for which a particular drug in a class is ineffective, on average: ANTI-DEPRESSANTS 38%; SSRIs ASTHMA DRUGS 40%; DIABETES DRUGS 43%; ARTHRITIS DRUGS 50%; ALZHEIMER’S DRUGS 70%; CANCER DRUGS 75%
• There are 132 personalized medicines on the market; ~42% of drugs in the development pipeline include biomarker investigation as part of R&D; personalized medicines accounted for 27 percent of new drug approvals in 2016

When it comes to challenges:

• Lack of regulatory in landscape puts some investors off;
• Reimbursement, where there is a Catch 22 situation “Widespread insurance coverage of diagnostic tests, for example, will likely require practice-based evidence demonstrating value. Obtaining the real-world data necessary for generating this evidence, however, is difficult unless the products and services in question are covered by insurance policies.”
• Decreased payment rates, partly because the CMS moved from allowing “stacked codes” to a “gapfill” methodology, which allows regional contractors to set prices
• A new rule that appeared in the Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA) may put downward pressure on utilization of personalized medicine, as there is no mechanism for capturing the value of targeted treatment
• Clinical Adoption is slow due to lack of education and lack of IT infrastructure — “most health care organizations do not have formalized plans to leverage advances in genomics and data analytics to personalize patient care, and are unprepared to implement personalized medicine programs”

Scott Gottlieb has been chosen by Trump to head the FDA. The most moderate of the names doing the gossip rounds, he is thought to support maintaining ensuring drugs are both safe and effective before approving them — some other candidates supported dropping the “effective” part.

Science news

• An article in Naturereports on a new technique for uncovering the 3D architecture of the genome, including mulit-enhancer contacts.
• Where do circulating DNA fragments come from? A new methodlooks at methylation haplotypes to determine tissue origin — allowing for cancer status and tissue origin to be determined from a blood draw. This could be a big deal in the liquid biopsy space. Singlera Genomics will attempt to commercialize the technology. Sensitivity can be increased by running another methylation test in parallel, based on the open/closed chromatin status.
• The gene CDH2 has beenimplicated in sudden cardiac death.
• The gene SEMA4D has beenlinked to obesity in African populations – those with variants in this gene were on average 6lbs heavier. Obesity is more common in those with African ancestry than others, and other populations lack variation in the gene. The study highlights how important it is to study disease associations outside of Caucasian populations.
• A review on using genetics for transplants.
• Alarge effort to sequence plants used in Chinese Medicine.
• And on the subject of prediction, a model that incorporates omic-datato predict years of life post treatment for breast cancer is able to explain some of the variance after more conventional variables are factored in.

In the “healthy exome” space, Arivale have started offering polygenic profiles — i.e. giving their customers risk scores that aggregate over many variants. There is little data that speaks to the scientific validity of this.

George Church is teaming up with brain training game Lumosity to uncover the genetics behind those with outstanding memory.

Geisinger are leading the way with implementing genomic medicine. Here is a Mendelspod interview with their Director of Clinical Genomics.

There are dozens of direct to consumer tests that allow for determining paternity. This study looked at the privacy policies and terms of services of 43 such companies, and concludes that “recreational genetics carries both the risk of unintentionally revealing misidentified paternity, and also the risk that fathers will deliberately use these services to test their children’s paternity without revealing their intentions to the mother or any other third party.”