Irving, Texas-based Caris Life Sciences Inc. has launched an AI-based genomic profiling test to better characterize cases of cancer of unknown primary origin (CUP) and atypical cases and offer appropriate treatment options. Known as the MI GPS (Genomic Profiling Similarity) Score, the analysis is based on an AI analysis of a 592-gene panel of all the clinically relevant genetic biomarkers for cancer.

HONG KONG – South Korean biomarker-based molecular diagnostic firm Genomictree Inc. has built a U.S. unit in Pasadena, Calif., with an investment of KRW12 billion (US$10 million). The Daejeon, South Korean-based company first disclosed its plan to build the U.S. branch in March.

In the capital of digital sharing and over-sharing, Silicon Valley, contributing one’s whole genome to science in the name of fun and self-knowledge has never felt that controversial. Engineers share software code liberally every day on sites like GitHub and Bitbucket. Plenty of those same coders and their investors gleefully joined 23andMe spit parties back in the heady days before the Federal Trade Commission jumped in with a call to sanity. Silicon Valley is still over-sharing. Someone is literally live-streaming their walk from a train station to a bar on Twitter’s new Periscope app as I write. Superficially, it seems...

U.S. and British government agencies are moving toward enabling what would be the first clinical trials of what is, in effect, human germline engineering – genetic modifications that would be passed down through the generations. The modifications would not be made to nuclear DNA. Instead, the procedure being considered is oocyte modification – creating an egg cell with the nuclear DNA of one woman and the mitochondrial DNA of another. The goal would be to allow women with mitochondrial diseases to have babies that share their nuclear DNA, but are not at risk of inheriting their mitochondrial disease. The UK...