At the TGen tour, various projects with an objective to help the quantity and quality of life were discussed. One project that was being worked on is mind crowd, a crowdsourcing approach to finding the effects of aging on the brain. On the website mindcrowd.org, adults of various backgrounds can take tests involving matching up word pairs and pressing a button when it appears. This way, a general correlation between age and various variables can be measured and outliers of the study (i.e. those with extremely high or low performance) can be studied extensively. These studies can be related with the development of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Also, zebrafish are common test subjects for different potentially beneficial mutations. They happen to share 70% of their genome with humans and act as a precursor to mammalian tests of drugs in rats. Various mutations were bred in order to show the effect on the fish. One example of a disease was pancreatic cancer in the fishes, where researches at TGen were able to collect data on the effect of various treatments on the fish. This leads to TGen’s ability to individually sequence genome of patients and recommend selective treatment in dire situations. Using various machines, genomes of patients can be sequences in 48 hours in order to find treatments that work specifically for that person. Targeted drugs take too long to be produced, approved, then delivered to patients in need; thus, non-targeted drugs, or drugs meant for other diseases, can be found based on the genome of the patient. One aspect of TGen that differentiates this organizations from others is its vast array of machinery. One example is Tartus, or a machine that is used to speed up the processes of moving samples and reduce human error. Another example is the supercomputer with a capacity of four petabytes, approximately 4,000 laptops. This shows the variety of different methods and technology that are utilized in order to help cure rare individual diseases.
On March 9, 2020, the Phoenix Branch went on a lab tour at the translational genomics research institute (TGen). The tour guide gave a very informational presentation about the institute as well as the TGen facility in Flagstaff, Arizona which focuses on pathology. The volunteers learned about how TGen’s works have come into play in real life applications on patients. For example, in a young female patient named Shelby who had an diagnosed condition went to TGen to get sequenced and the people at TGen were able to help her and give her treatment similar to Parkinson’s to alleviate her symptoms. Shelby’s story was an inspiring one and showed the impact that TGen has on medicine.
Throughout the tour, the guide showed us a lot of their machines that they used to sequence genomes. They had their half a million machine called NovaSeq which could sequence 48 genomes in 48 hours. This was a huge advancement for them in terms of time efficiency.
The people that participated in this event were Katherine Wei, Ethan Wei, Steven Zeng, Audrey Zhang, Richard Cheng, Andrew Yang, Amy Xie, Jack Xie, Michael Chen, Davina Chen, Eddie Chen, Michelle Lee, Xinyun He, Guangwen He, Huanghua Wu, Edward Zhang, Emma Zhang, Zachy Wang and Jiyu Wang.
Some of the reviews we got about the tour:
“A very good tour and visit of first-hand the technology and biomedical research laboratories where TGen scientists unlock the mysteries of cancer, neurological disease, and diabetes.”
“Today was definitely an experience I would never forget. I learned how people in the science research field figured out how to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimers and pancreatic cancer. Amanda showed us a little video about how a girl was diagnosed with a rare condition and it honestly left a little hope in humanity. There are doctors out there who would instantly just gave up, however doctors at TGEN are people who never gave up. Adding on, this tour also allowed me to have a more deeper understanding of how the genome works through a series of events. Another thing that could work on to improve the tour is asking more questions to students to be more engaged.”
“I thought the tour was pretty cool and interesting. However, I wish they used simple less scientific words or explained what they meant cause it was kinda hard to understand sometimes. Overall it was really fun and it’d be really nice if we could come back.”
