New Kaiser genomics lab uses robots for faster, cheaper routine genetic tests

An archway of blue and white balloons adorned the doorway of an in any other case unremarkable workplace constructing in San Jose this week, marking the grand opening of a brand new high-tech laboratory for Kaiser Permanente Northern California, which serves 4.5 million folks within the area.

The brand new lab is an effort to develop and streamline some widespread genetic testing routinely achieved by the insurer and health care provider, and a step in the direction of rising entry to one of many subsequent frontiers in tech and medication, customized “precision” remedy primarily based on genome testing.

“Genomics is the research of all of the genes… in distinction to genetics… the research of a single situation or trait,” mentioned Dr. Jason Rosenbaum, the director of the brand new lab, and a pathologist with Kaiser.

Rosenbaum led a tour of the amenities taking a bunch of reporters and cameras from one sterile, shiny, white room to a different, every with a number of large printer-like machines, transferring round tiny pallets with dozens of samples, as technicians in white lab coats supervised.

The grand opening marked the primary time the lab ran a non-invasive pre-natal screening take a look at, certainly one of a number of pre-natal screenings that may be achieved. This selection is finished with a blood test, anytime after the tenth week of being pregnant. Superior know-how permits technicians to measures small items of fetal DNA within the mom’s blood, and is used to display screen for sure chromosome issues, together with Down Syndrome.

The lab, in its outdated digs, had doing about 30,000 assessments a 12 months, however all the brand new robotic tools has allowed the lab to double its output, with out hiring any new employees, in response to Rosenbaum. They lab is planning on doing over 60,000 of these assessments this 12 months, and can develop to 160,000 assessments a 12 months by 2029.

The ability was customized constructed for Kaiser’s functions, with robotics that assist just a few technicians run dozens of assessments at a time with fewer errors.

The Kaiser Permanente Northern California Regional Genomics Laboratory is about to be totally operational by the top of this 12 months.

They’re additionally not the most important or most complicated-looking units within the constructing, the dimensions of a small workplace printer, however they do “arguably probably the most subtle medical testing people have ever created,” Rosenbaum mentioned.

That subtle testing is used to supply remedies tailor-made to a person’s specific genes.

“Folks might even see [this testing] marketed on TV, which is a singular American function of our well being system,” Rosenbaum mentioned.

“A whole lot of the focused medication which might be marketed in sporting occasions just like the Tremendous Bowl, are for mutations which might be particular to a given type of most cancers. Up up to now, all of that testing has been despatched out to reference laboratories. Our plan within the subsequent 5 years is to internalize all of that to supply it in our system to our sufferers.”

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