The following article describes how scientists analyzed an entire human genome from a lady with cancer and found 10 mutations which they believe may have contributed to her disease [LINK].

Cancer is not a single disease, it’s a very personal one. I will write more in a future post on what exactly is meant by this. The human genome consists of approximately 3 billion instructions (DNA base pairs). That’s a LOT of instructions and hence a requires a lot of analysis. When the scientists say they’ve found 10 mutations, they literally mean 10 base pairs out of 3 billion which have gone wrong.

Today, because of the sheer size of the information, scientists must focus their research to a few targeted genes within the genome. If they don’t pick the right ones to look at, they’ll miss the mutation. That’s basically what’s happened over the last 40 years.

This latest research looked at the entire genome and of the 10 mutations, 8 of these were new and would have gone unnoticed using traditional targeted research.

I remember back in 2000, a company called Celera were analyzing the human genome and they completed it in 2003. It took a number of years to look through and sequence that much information.

Fast forward to 2008, it took a couple of months to sequence this lady’s genome. Moore’s Law states that technology capability doubles roughly every 18months and this has held true since the 1960′s.

One day, and it’s not far away, we’ll be able to analyze a genome, YOUR genome in a couple of days. Until then, scientists must rely on distributed computing techniques, such as the Stanford Protein Folding project [LINK] and YOUR computer.

Please help by visiting this page [LINK], download and install the folding application and if you’d like, enter my wife’s team number #144824. This is a way to make a REAL contribution that will one day yield new and improved gene targeted therapies that will fight the range of diseases that is "cancer".