Fast DNA Sequencing Can Offer Diagnostic Clues When Newborns Need Intensive Care
When Nathaly Sweeney launched her career as a pediatric heart specialist a few years ago, she says it was a struggle to anticipate which babies would need emergency surgery or when.
"We just didn't know whose heart was going to fail first," she says. "There was no rhyme or reason who was coming to the intensive care unit over and over again, versus the ones that were doing well."
Now, just a few years later, Sweeney has at her fingertips the results of the complete genome sequence of her sickest patients in a couple of days.
That's because of remarkable strides in the speed at which genomes can be sequenced and analyzed. Doctors who treat newborns in the intensive care unit are turning to this technology to help them diagnose their difficult cases.
Sweeney sees her tiny patients in the neonatal intensive care unit of in San Diego. Doctors there can figure out what's wrong with about two-thirds of
