China's $9 billion effort to beat the U.S. in genetic testing

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 1, 2017 at 8:03:17 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] China's $9 billion effort to beat the U.S. in genetic testing
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> China’s $9 billion effort to beat the U.S. in genetic testing
> By Ylan Q. Mui
> Dec 30 2016
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/30/chinas-9-billion-effort-to-beat-the-u-s-in-genetic-testing/>
>
> BOSTON — Lindsay Weekes knew something was wrong as soon as her son was born.
>
> Her pregnancy had been easy. The baby was a strapping 6 pounds, 12 ounces, with thick, curly black hair like his 
> father’s. But from the first moment Quinlan drew air, Lindsey could see he was tense, his muscles rigid.
>
> Within 24 hours, Quinlan was whisked away from their hospital to an intensive care unit at a nearby medical 
> university. There he began a battery of tests in hopes of diagnosing his disorder, the start of a tortuous journey 
> that has thrust the family into the center of a global economic race to push the limits of medicine.
>
> The search for an answer has taken Quinlan to the cutting edge of the emerging field: the use of genomics, the study 
> of our DNA, to tailor health care. The United States has long been the the industry’s undisputed leader, performing 
> much of the research that first decoded our DNA about 15 years ago.
>
> But now China is emerging as America’s fiercest competitor, and it is sinking billions of dollars into research and 
> funding promising new companies both at home and abroad — including a laboratory that handles some of the toughest 
> cases at Boston Children’s Hospital, where Quinlan has become a favorite of the staff.
>
> Finding an answer for Quinlan and children like him relies as much on Chinese expertise as it does American 
> ingenuity. One of the founders of the lab was born and trained in China before immigrating to the United States. 
> Chinese company WuXi NextCODE is one of its chief investors, and researchers there use WuXi’s programs to analyze the 
> reams of data inside our DNA.
>
> Under President-elect Donald Trump, America’s relationship with China has been defined by frustration over the loss 
> of factory jobs in the nation’s industrial heartland to the assembly lines of the world’s second-largest economy. But 
> experts say it is the battle for dominance in innovation and science that is more likely to determine the economy of 
> the future.
>
> “I’m very frustrated at how aggressively China is investing in this space while the U.S. is not moving with the same 
> kind of purpose,” said Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount 
> Sinai. “China has established themselves as a really competitive force.”
>
> For the Weekes family, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
>
> “There’s some missing piece of the puzzle that we need to find right now,” Lindsay Weekes said.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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