STAT January 12, 2022
About a year ago, Matthew Kunzman’s heart was failing, despite doctors’ best attempts to bolster it with every pump and gadget they could think of. But the 14-year-old has bounced back in large part due to super-speedy genetic sequencing that pinpointed the cause of his disease and helped doctors decide how to treat it — in just 11 and a half hours.
That speedy diagnosis — faster than any other medical team has previously reported — resulted from a new approach to DNA sequencing to help patients with deadly and rare diseases. On Wednesday, a team of Stanford researchers and collaborators published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine reporting that they had sequenced 12 seriously ill patients...