The US National Institutes of Health has announced that it will spend $25 million over five years to support a program looking into the medical and ethical repercussions of sequencing the DNA of babies.

The awards will fund studies on the potential for genome and exome sequencing to expand and improve newborn health care. Genomic sequencing examines the complete DNA blueprint of the cells, and exome sequencing is a strategy to selectively sequence exons, the short stretches of DNA within our genomes that code for proteins.

Each of the new awards will consist of three parts: Genomic sequencing and analysis; research related to patient care; and the ethical, legal and social implications of using genomic information in the newborn period. Teams of researchers will work to further the understanding of disorders that appear in newborns and to improve treatments for these diseases using genomic information.

Further information is available through the NIH website.

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(Photo: Baby’s First DNA by estonia76 from Flickr)

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