Dr. George Church is professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of Personal Genome Project. His 1984 Harvard PhD included the first methods for direct genome sequencing and molecular multiplexing, which helped initiate the Human Genome Project. In addition to innovations that contributed to nearly all next generation sequencing methods, Dr. Church is a principle inventor of protein nanopore sequencing. He has founded close to a dozen companies in the areas of Genomic Medicine, Gene Therapy and Synthetic Biology, such as Editas, Gen9, WarpDrive, Joule, Knome to name a few. Dr. Church has also pioneered new privacy, biosafety , environmental & biosecurity policies.
GENOME SEQUENCING
Sequencing a person’s genome can identify susceptibility to various diseases, aid in early disease diagnosis, and enable precision medicine – personalization of therapy based on individual specific genomic biomarkers.
CANCER DIAGNOSTICS
Detecting diseases in early stages dramatically improves therapeutic outcomes. In Cancer, average 5 year survival rate is close to 90% when diagnosed at stage 1, and stands at less than 25% when diagnosed at stage 4. In contrast, cost of therapy when diagnosed post metastasis is approximately 2.5 times that when diagnosed at early stages.
