The Mount Sinai Health System began an effort this week to build a vast database of patient genetic information that can be studied by researchers — and by a large pharmaceutical company.
The goal is to search for treatments for illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to kidney disease, but the effort to gather genetic information for many patients, collected during routine blood draws, could also raise privacy concerns.
The data will be rendered anonymous, and Mount Sinai said it had no intention of sharing it with anyone other than researchers. But consumer or genealogical databases full of genetic information, such as Ancestry.com and GEDmatch, have been used by detectives searching for genetic clues that might help them solve old crimes.
Vast sets of genetic sequences can unlock new insights into many diseases and also pave the way for new treatments, researchers at Mount Sinai say. But the only way to compile those research databases is to first convince huge numbers of people to agree to have their genomes sequenced.
By Scott Solomon, The MIT Press Reader | 02.12.2026
Aggregated News
Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.
“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp...
MUMBRA, India — The afternoon sun shines on the woman in a commuter-town café, highlighting her almond-shaped eyes and pale skin, a look often sought after by couples who need an egg to have a baby.
A heart attack patient has become the first person to be treated in a clinical trial of an experimental gene therapy, which aims to strengthen blood vessels after coronary bypass surgery.
Coronary artery bypass surgery is performed to treat...
Scientists at UNSW Sydney have developed a new form of CRISPR technology that could make gene therapy safer while also resolving a decades-long debate about how genes are switched off. The research shows that small chemical markers attached to DNA
The Center for Genetics and Society is fiscally sponsored by Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Please visit www.tides.org/state-nonprofit-disclosures for additional information.
