Patients should benefit from timely exchange of DNA sequencing results
As more TGen studies use whole genome sequencing — decoding DNA to determine a patient’s molecular make-up — TGen has a growing potential to share clinically relevant test results with patients and their oncologists. Sharing that information is a cornerstone of TGen’s ongoing initiative to help provide patients and their physicians with personalized therapeutics. But to share that information, our studies must be performed, or confirmed, in laboratories certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA), passed by Congress to ensure quality laboratory testing. Until now, TGen has contracted with outside CLIA-certified laboratories. This has meant an oftentimes cumbersome, costly and timeconsuming back-and-forth exchange of data among the parties involved in our studies, sometimes adding as much as four weeks to generate a report for the patient.
Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Dorrance Family Foundation, TGen is creating an in-house CLIA Laboratory on the 4th Floor of the Phoenix TGen headquarters. Start-up is anticipated before the end of 2012. Once CLIA certification is established at TGen, all applicable testing results, including genomic sequencing assays, can be directly reported to a patient’s medical record.
Dr. Baumbach-Reardon named CLIA Lab Director
TGen’s CLIA Lab will be under the directorship of Dr. Lisa Baumbach-Reardon, Associate Professor of TGen’s Integrated Cancer Genomics Division. She also is Director of the DNA Diagnostic Laboratory in Cancer Genomics, which involves clinical molecular diagnostics, the sequencing branch of the CLIA Lab.
“Having developed and maintained CLIA labs elsewhere, I am excited to help create this state-of-the-art facility at TGen, and I look forward to helping enable our scientific staff make substantial new discoveries that will benefit humanity,” Dr. Baumbach-Reardon said.
To learn more about the Translational Genomics Research Institute vist TGen.org.