EP 255: Turning long-read sequencing into a routine part of clinical care with Danny Miller of the University of Washington

This week on The Genetics Podcast, Patrick is joined by Dr. Danny Miller, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington and Attending Physician at Seattle Children's Hospital. They discuss the case for making long-read sequencing the first genetic test every patient receives, the reference dataset his lab is building from the 1000 Genomes Project to resolve structural variants, publicly available methylation signatures as biomarkers for diagnosis and treatment response, and his vision for genome-informed care from newborn screening through the NICU.Show Notes0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast01:00 Welcome to Danny01:41 The case for long-read sequencing as first-line genetic testing02:52 Current barriers to wider use of long-read sequencing 04:14 Building a long-read reference dataset from 1000 Genomes for variant filtering06:47 How long-read sequencing can solve a missed diagnosis 08:12 The clinical case for complete telomere-to-telomere genomes10:39 What it will take to shift the clinical genetics status quo12:06 Making methylation signatures public to diagnose disease and track therapy15:58 Danny's path from programming and finance into clinical genetics18:19 Danny's lived experience with deafness and achondroplasia, and how it shapes his approach to genetic counseling21:46 Danny's optimism about AI in genomics and worry about AI in education27:15 The path to making genomes a routine part of the medical record29:47 The vision of same-day newborn genomic data guiding NICU treatment decisions34:31 Closing remarksFind out more:Miller Lab (https://millerlaboratory.com/)