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In an unusual move, a leading genetic testing company is making genetic information from the people it has tested publicly available, a move the company says could make a large trove of data available to researchers looking for genes linked to various diseases.
The company, Ambry Genetics, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will put information from 10,000 of its customers into a database called AmbryShare.
“We’re going to discover a lot of new diagnostic targets and a lot of new drug targets,” Aaron Elliott, interim chief scientific officer at Ambry, which is based in Southern California, said in an interview. “With our volume, we can pull out a significant number of genes just by the sheer number we are looking at.”
Pooling data from many people is considered crucial to finding the genetic elements that contribute to illnesses. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative plans to assemble a database containing genetic and medical information from a million people to be used for research.
Ambry’s move “is to be applauded,” said Edward Abrahams, president of the Personalized...