Geekwire Health Tech

It has been nearly two decades since scientists accomplished the first complete sequencing of the human genome. This historic moment gave us an unprecedented view of human DNA, the genetic code that determines everything from our eye color to our chance of disease, unlocking some of the biggest mysteries of human life. Twenty years later, despite the prevalence of genetic sequencing, considerable work remains to fulfill the promise of these advances to alleviate and cure human illness and disease. Scientists and researchers are “actually extremely good at reading genomes, but we're very, very bad at understanding what we're reading,” says Lea Starita, co-director of Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine’s Advanced Technology Lab, and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. But that is changing thanks to new tools and approaches, including one called Deep Mutational Scanning. This powerful technique for determining genetic var