Question: what would you do if you came across a new unknown illness?

Louise Stanley answered on 13 Nov 2012:

Hello!

We often recieve blood samples from patients where it is unclear what is causing their symptoms. Until recently we were only able to look at very specific genes but we have new technology which is referred to as Next Generation Sequencing which can sequence things much quicker, more cheaply and has enormous capacities. This means that it is possible to look at peoples entire genome – in doing this we would hope to be able to identify the cause of the illness. However, this is not as simple as it may sound as it is actually very difficult to identify the reason why some people are ill – kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack. So sometimes you are lucky and other times the answer for someones illness remains unknown. I hope this answers your question – if not let me know and I will try again!

Louise.