Lord Freyberg – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Freyberg on 2016-01-25.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what advice they received from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute during the set-up phase of Genomics England regarding the appropriateness in cases of cancer of using comparisons of tumour to normal whole genome sequencing at moderate sequence coverage, as opposed to focused actionable gene panel testing at deep sequence coverage; and what current technology is used by Genomics England.

Lord Prior of Brampton

The set up phase of the 100,00 Genomes Project was based on advice from Expert Working Groups which included experts from across the United Kingdom, including the Sanger Centre. The Working Group concluded that a more fundamental understanding of cancer would be delivered by whole genome sequencing compared to gene panels. This approach is part of the wider aim of the 100,000 Genomes Project to transform the National Health Service diagnostic pathway for patients and to build a dataset which will enable new scientific research. Adopting whole genome sequencing has already catalysed a fall in the costs which was also anticipated by the Expert Working Group.