And just like that, it is the Season 3 finale. This season, we began our journey by learning how genetics can uncover distant relatives you’ve never met. We talked about genomic data access and privacy issues. We also discovered how genomic technology is helping scientists prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.
For our season finale, we are exploring the world of rare disease research and advocacy. In the United States, a disease is rare when it affects fewer than 200,000 people. There are more than 7,000 identified rare diseases. Although individually they are each uncommon, they collectively affect 25 to 30 million people in the United States alone.
Individuals with rare diseases often embark on years-long diagnostic journeys, visiting doctor after doctor and often receiving misdiagnoses. However, advances in genomic sequencing technology are helping patients avoid this long and painful path to diagnosis. By identifying the specific DNA changes that cause the disease, clinicians can provide the patient with a diagnosis.
While affording patients a diagnosis ends their diagnostic odyssey, it doesn’t always solve all of their healthcare problems, as many rare diseases do not have treatments or cures. Disease advocacy and education groups offer families a reliable source to learn about living with the disease and advocating for the best care for their loved ones. These groups also serve as an important source of community for rare disease families.
Listen to Tiny Expeditions Season 3, Episode 6, “Solving a diagnostic puzzle: the challenges of rare diseases,” to journey into the world of rare diseases to learn how scientists are trying to end the long and emotional diagnostic odysseys that many patients and their families endure.
Behind the Scenes
Greg Cooper, PhD (pictured right) is a faculty investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. His research focuses on understanding the genomic basis of human disease, with a particular interest in rare developmental disorders. He and his lab identify changes in DNA (also called variants) that cause diseases and apply the information in the clinic to help provide diagnoses to individuals with rare, undiagnosed diseases.
Through several collaborative research projects, Dr. Cooper and his team have sequenced the genomes of over 1,800 individuals with rare, undiagnosed diseases. Of those individuals, many of whom are children, 27 percent received a diagnosis due to genome sequencing. An additional 18 percent had a change in their DNA that looks interesting but isn’t definitively linked to their disease yet.
As Dr. Cooper mentioned during the episode, rare disease research cannot happen in a vacuum because there are not enough patients in a given region with the same rare disease. Sometimes the lab identifies a new DNA variant but doesn’t have enough information to prove it causes disease. In such a case, they submit the information to an online portal called GeneMatcher. If another researcher finds the same DNA change in their patient and submits it to GeneMatcher, the two will be connected.
By identifying more individuals with similar variants and similar symptoms, the team can confirm the gene is likely the cause of symptoms. The lab has submitted more than 280 genes to Gene Matcher since 2016, leading to 25 collaborative publications. Through these GeneMatcher collaborations, Cooper’s team has linked more than a dozen genes to developmental disorders, including EBF3, RALA, and BRSK2.
Over half of the individuals that the Cooper lab has sequenced did not receive a definitive diagnosis from the genome sequencing. This is likely because many genetic variants are difficult or impossible to detect through typical genomic sequencing approaches. Traditionally, genome sequencing is performed by generating millions of “short” sequences, called reads, which are generally around 150 base pairs long. These short reads are pieced back together like a puzzle using a human reference genome as a template. However, the human genome has a lot of complex regions, such as repetitive regions, that are hard to interpret using such short reads.
One potential approach to overcoming the limitations of short-read technology is to use a sequencing platform that produces longer reads. Recent advances in long-read sequencing now allow for the production of reads up to 1,000 times longer than those from short-read sequencing. Having fewer, bigger puzzle pieces leads to fewer gaps in the whole sequence once assembled. The Cooper lab has begun using long-read sequencing technology to help identify DNA variants responsible for previously undiagnosable, rare neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
Although we had only met Kareem and Sarita Edwards once over Zoom before our interview, it felt like we were talking with old friends. The Edwards are such energetic and strong people with a passion for their family that is infectious. We are so lucky they let us share their story on the podcast.
Kareem and Sarita (pictured top and bottom right) are the co-founders of the E. WE Foundation, but more importantly, they are the parents of five amazing children. It was the birth of their fifth son, Elijah Wayne (pictured middle right), that set them on their advocacy journey. As they mentioned during the episode, Elijah was diagnosed in utero with a genetic condition called Trisomy 18, or Edwards syndrome.
Because Trisomy 18 is medically defined as “incompatible with life,” the Edwards have had to fight for medical resources and specialty therapy for Elijah since he was born. It was these struggles that empowered Kareem and Sarita to start the E. WE Foundation. They wanted to share what they learned from their experiences to hopefully make the Trisomy 18 journey easier for other families living with the disease.
The E.WE Foundation is committed to ensuring all families affected by Trisomy 18 have equitable access to quality healthcare, resources, health & financial literacy, and disease education. The foundation supports several programs aimed at helping other Trisomy 18 families on their journey, whether it be emotional or financial support or educational programming.
The LEAP Program is geared toward education about Trisomy 18. This ranges from health literacy to community education to patient advocacy. The ZEBRA Program provides support and resources to families, including everything from self-care to mental health support to comfort care for families mourning the loss of a child. ZEBRA also connects Trisomy 18 families so they can be a part of each other’s journey. The STRIPE program helps families facing economic hardship due to Trisomy 18. This can be anything from medical care to end-of-life care.
Kareem and Sarita are also active advocates for Trisomy 18 and other rare diseases. They have been the voice for several pieces of legislation over the years. One of the current pieces of legislation they are championing is the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Reauthorization Act. This act would ensure that all newborns receive newborn screening, regardless of any diagnoses they already have. Elijah, like many Trisomy 18 babies, did not receive newborn screening, which could have helped identify his hearing loss and kidney issues earlier in his life. To learn more about other pieces of legislation that the E. WE Foundation is supporting, click here.
To learn more about the E. WE Foundation and follow Elijah’s journey, visit theewefoundation.org, or stay up to date with Elijah on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Season 3 of Tiny Expeditions is made possible through the support of our sponsors:
Sarah Sharman 00:00
Season Three of Tiny Expeditions is made possible through the support of our sponsor EBSCO Information Services, the leading provider of online research content, search technologies, and workflow tools, serving public libraries, schools, academic institutions, corporations, and medical institutions around the world. Proudly delivering information access for researchers at all levels, online and ebsco.com. That’s EBSCO.com.
Chris Powell 00:31
Welcome to this episode of Tiny Expeditions. My name is Chris Powell. I’m going to be your storytelling guide for this episode
Sarah Sharman 00:38
And I’m Dr. Sarah Sharman here to help you understand the science.
Chris Powell 00:42
Sarah, it’s here. We knew this day was gonna come at some point, but it’s Season Three, Episode Six. It’s the grand finale. And we have covered so much this season.
Sarah Sharman 00:52
We began our journey by discussing DNA’s role in filling out our family trees. We talked about genomic data access and privacy issues. And we talked about diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease, which are pretty common and affect a lot of people.
Chris Powell 01:06
Today, though, we want to talk about something that may not be on your radar screens, rare disease. Now, if you’ve been diagnosed with a rare disease, it’s definitely something on your radar screen. But by definition, a rare disease is something that statistically doesn’t affect a whole lot of people. But the research happening with these diseases is equally important.
Greg Cooper 01:26
My name is Greg Cooper. I am a faculty investigator here at HudsonAlpha.
Greg Cooper 01:30
At its simplest level, when we say rare disease, we’re talking about things that are rare, that don’t occur very often. And by that, we sort of mean, if you were to pick a bunch of people at random, that very few of them would have that particular rare condition. So, and this is in contrast, so you take something like diabetes, for example. Diabetes is quite a common condition. A significant percentage of people, if you just pick out random people, many of them will have diabetes. But there are many conditions where if you picked 100 people at random, or 1000, or a million people randomly, you might not see anyone with that particular condition. And so, examples like this might be cystic fibrosis is one that people might be familiar with that is a significant medical condition. For the folks that have it, it’s a very significant issue for them to deal with. But it’s not common. So, most people, the vast majority of people, won’t develop cystic fibrosis, but a small percentage will.
Greg Cooper 02:23
The trick with rare diseases, though, is that while individually they are very rare. But when you add up all the different rare diseases—you add up the one in 10,000 this, one in 5000 that, one in a million this—collectively, so as a group, rare diseases, in fact, become quite common. And so lots and lots of people and families are affected by rare diseases as a group, even though individually those conditions might be quite rare.
Sarah Sharman 02:48
In true Tiny Expeditions fashion, we promise we will dive into the amazing research being done on rare diseases. This includes research to continually improve the technology affording patients a diagnosis, as well as programs that are bringing these diagnostic tools to more patients and their families.
Chris Powell 03:05
Before we get to that, we wanted to take a moment and talk with someone who has been affected by rare disease. We came across the Edwards family and sat down with them to talk about their experience of having a son with trisomy 18. We do understand that not all rare diseases are the same. And while we will hear of their experiences with Edwards syndrome, their experience is not the same as everyone with rare diseases, but we wanted to at least get a feel for what it’s like with life with rare disease.
Kareem Edwards 03:34
My name is Kareem Edwards, co-founder of the E. WE Foundation.
Sarita Edwards 03:40
And I am Sarita Edwards, founding partner with my husband Kareem. We are parent advocates to a five-year-old little boy named Elijah, who was diagnosed in utero with trisomy 18. So, Elijah is five years old. He celebrated his fifth birthday in March of this year. A milestone that I don’t know that we knew positively that we would see. So, we celebrate that wholeheartedly. Elijah just started kindergarten this year. Super excited about that. He is a little miracle. He is very vibrant and happy. He loves to clap and play. But he does have an extensive list of medical complexities. We have about 18 specialists that we see. We commute two hours one way for his health care. We do have doctors here locally as well, but pretty much all of his specialty care is about two hours away.
Sarita Edwards 04:49
We were told around 20 to 23 weeks pregnant that Elijah would pass away in utero during the delivery process or shortly after birth. That’s what we were told, and if I am completely honest, that is what I expected. We were sent home post-delivery in hospice care. We stayed in hospice care for about seven months, no interventions of any type of therapeutic services for Elijah. And then we aged out of hospice. They told us that because we were pursuing life-sustaining measures, it was a conflict with our insurance. At the time we were in hospice care, I guess around seven months is when we actually started seeing specialists for the first time and, and talking to, you know, folks other than hospice or our pediatrician. And that’s when we really started learning more about what Trisomy 18 even means because I don’t think we really had a clear definition before that.
Kareem Edwards 06:01
What was it, five years ago, there was not a lot of information or detail about Trisomy 18. It was, ‘it’s a terminal illness, baby’s gonna die, period, forget about it.’ That was it. Don’t Google search because what you’ll see is probably not something that’s welcoming or not something you want to see at this point. So just don’t do that, take our word for it. You may want to consider terminating now. Was it at what 22 weeks, 23 weeks, something like that? Yeah. And that’s where we were fearful, if I’m being honest, but because of faith, our faith hopeful at the same time. So, it was similar to being between a rock and a hard place.
Sarita Edwards 06:55
So, trisomy 18 is when there is an extra 18th chromosome. Elijah is full trisomy 18, which means he has that extra chromosome on all of his cells. You can also be mosaic or partial. We have had tto genetic tests to confirm that he is full, which is another anomaly, you know, as far as why he does so well with it. But it is a chromosome abnormality. We know that it’s considered rare. We do know that it’s genetic. We do know that it happens just in the process of formation, right? Like it’s, it’s not something that we could have prevented. And that’s really the broad scope of what Trisomy 18 is. We do know that it causes several issues in the human body.
Sarita Edwards 08:00
We were told prenatally that Elijah was missing three-fourths of his brain, that his esophagus was offline, and that one of the valves in his heart was not connected- they later determined VSD. We were told that he had liver issues and kidney issues. They later confirmed that he only has one working kidney right now. The other one is cystic and nonfunctional. Clenched hands, rock bottom feet. I mean, it’s just a list of issues. And so far, everything that they told us, to some degree, has been present, but not to the extent that they explained it. I mean, statistically, five to ten percent only live past their first birthday with severe challenges. And we are very, very blessed that Elijah, he doesn’t have the trach, he doesn’t have the G-tube, he doesn’t have a lot of the things that a lot of these other kids do. You know, I would love to know why.
Kareem Edwards 09:17
The question for me is, we don’t think that we’re like special people that Elijah’s case is, well, an anomaly. We, myself, I wonder, are other kids the same, but because of the diagnosis, they’re being taken down this road of you got to have this, you got to have that. Because we were told the same thing, you need a trach, got to have a G-tube. And our question was always why? Well, because he has Trisomy 18. Well understand that, but why
Sarita Edwards 09:51
I think that’s why that education piece is so important. Because, you know if we’re just creating solutions based on what we know, then that means maybe we need to learn something different. And if those opportunities are there, I think they should be given to families. Because again, like Kareem said earlier, what about that new mom and dad, that have never had a kid before? They don’t know those questions to ask. And, and I don’t know, prior to Elijah, if I would have been as comfortable as I am now, pushing back to a physician, you know, it wasn’t until I felt like my back was against the wall.
Kareem Edwards 10:44
I can say, I don’t know, it was the moment we have this living baby here that is needing to be fed or whatever. And they tell us to give him morphine. And then she was like, morphine, why would I do that? ‘For his pain.’ And she immediately goes, ‘How do I know he’s in pain?’ And they were like, ‘Well, he’s crying.’ Okay, so why does that mean he’s in pain? How do I know he’s in pain? Well, what would you do for any other kids? And she was like, ‘Well, I see the need to change and or feed them.’ And they had this look on their face like, that makes sense, but give them the morphine.
Chris Powell 11:26
For parents, in those moments after having just given birth, there’s a ton of decisions and emotions that are flooding over you all at the same time. And for the Edwards family, that was all compounded because of Trisomy 18. And through this experience of having to deal with all of that at once it really gave birth to this idea of the E. WE Foundation, a foundation in which the Edwards family could then help other families who were struggling with the exact same scenario.
Sarita Edwards 11:58
You know we are an organization committed to making sure families have access to health care services. I think the whole goal is to try to bridge the gap between diagnosis, delivery, and that overall coordination of care. We know that every outcome won’t look the same for babies diagnosed with trisomy 18. But we want to, hopefully, provide families with as much information as we can for as long as they are on the journey.
Sarah Sharman 12:41
They’re doing amazing work and have touched many families across the globe. The foundation helps raise awareness about Trisomy 18 amongst the community, the research field, and various government offices. They develop and distribute educational materials to help families navigate hurdles and milestones. One of their programs provides financial support and end-of-life care for families. Above all else, though, the foundation brings together Trisomy 18 families, giving them a community to lean on during the good times and the bad.
Sarita Edwards 13:13
The information and the education is so important. And I think sometimes, you know, as a parent, I think sometimes we want that cure to try to just remove the diagnosis or the challenges that comes with the diagnosis. Or, you know, we want the medicine to try to fix something that we believe is broken. I think for us, though, the information in the education is that like, that’s the piece that we believe families can do so much more with. Research doesn’t always have to be about finding a cure. For us, I think, you know, I think when we talk about research, we’re talking about understanding more what this is and how it impacts children, and figuring out is there something we can do to make things easier from a scientific perspective from, you know, even for the kid and the parent, right.
Sarah Sharman 14:24
The Edwards family found out about Elijah’s diagnosis in utero because it was a known disease with a known genetic cause. Many families are struggling to find a name to define their loved one’s symptoms because the disease has not yet been discovered. It’s time to jump back into the research and learn how Dr. Cooper and his lab are trying to not only give families an answer to their health problems but also find the genetic cause of the diseases.
Greg Cooper 14:48
I am interested in doing basic genetics research. We are particularly interested in the genetic factors that give rise to intellectual disabilities and other kinds of developmental disabilities and children. So, a lot of the work that we do involves identifying children and their families who are dealing with some sort of developmental condition. And basically, looking at their DNA trying to understand if there are genetic factors that are giving rise to that. And we do that both as part of working with physicians to actually provide diagnostic information back to families. But then we also do research to try to learn about new conditions about new ways that we didn’t previously understand about how our human DNA shapes our traits, our attributes. You can learn things by studying rare diseases you often learn because it’s shared biology, right? We can affect the same genes or pathways or tissues. And so by studying a rare disease, you can often learn about a common disease. So, there’s a huge benefit to looking at rare disease that goes beyond the benefits to those individual families and patients, which is a very important motivating factor. But the point is, you can learn biology that translates across many different conditions across other areas that maybe you didn’t expect to learn about. That just by virtue of learning something basic about human biology, you learn something that translates to other diseases as well.
Sarah Sharman 16:15
Dr. Cooper’s rare disease research primarily focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders. That’s an umbrella term that covers many different diseases. Common symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders range from intellectual disability and delays in speech and communication to seizures and motor developmental delays, to name a few. This wide spectrum of symptoms makes neurodevelopmental disorders especially hard to diagnose.
Greg Cooper 16:40
The fundamental challenge with diagnosing a rare disease is that it’s rare. And so it’s very often true that a physician might not see in their entire career, he or she may or might not see a single case of any given rare disease. And so when one comes along, they are they haven’t seen it before. The other challenge is that many of the symptoms between any two rare diseases can overlap a lot. So we talked about things like seizures, there are hundreds of different conditions that will manifest with epilepsy or seizures. And so just observing that a child is having epilepsy doesn’t really tell you what the underlying causes, that’s a symptom that is spread across many different conditions. And because of that, and things like intellectual disabilities and these other things, these symptoms that we’re talking about, for any given rare disease, that it’s not, there’s no one symptom that says, Oh, it’s this, it’s this condition versus something else, it really is. There’s a collection of symptoms that differentiate this disease from another. And then there’s actually also variability within a disease.
Greg Cooper 17:45
So, our primary focus at HudsonAlpha and other research institutions in general, we are very interested in human genetics. So, we study DNA. And it’s because we know that our DNA has a lot of influence on our attributes. So that includes things like how tall we are or what the color of our hair is, but it also includes things like what your risk for lots of different diseases are. Diabetes is an example where your genetics have a role in what your risk of diabetes is. For neurodevelopmental disorders, it turns out that they are heavily enriched for genetics having a huge impact.
Chris Powell 18:23
Having worked at HudsonAlpha for many years, we’ve been able to hear a lot of stories from families who are impacted by the work of the Cooper lab. Many of these families’ stories go on for months or even years of not knowing what’s wrong. They know something’s wrong, but they simply don’t have the answers to be able to put a name with what’s being presented in their child. And as we saw with the Edwards family, just having a name or a little bit of information can go a long way to helping these families.
Greg Cooper 18:54
A lot of families have been struggling with trying to understand why their child is having the symptoms that they have. And they might go see a neurologist, they might see a whole bunch of different specialists that focus on particular kinds of symptoms. But ultimately, they can’t get a resolution and say this is what’s happening. And this is why it happened. And they bounced around, they might get lots and lots of imaging done and bloodwork and all kinds of things. And ultimately, because those tests weren’t directed at the root cause they really were never going to be able to actually pinpoint with precision what was actually the precise diagnosis for that child. So, a lot of the families that we have worked with in terms of our research projects had been dealing with this for years.
Sarah Sharman 19:40
Advances in genetic sequencing technology are beginning to dramatically cut the time a patient waits for a diagnosis. One exciting tool called Long read sequencing allows scientists to gain a more complete picture of a person’s DNA compared to the technology used during the Human Genome Project, for example.
Greg Cooper 19:57
The new advance and the thing that we’re really excited about here at HudsonAlpha, and again elsewhere, is a new technology that allows us to look at much bigger pieces. So instead of millions of teeny tiny pieces, we might look at 10s or 1000s of pieces that are 100, 1000 times bigger. When you have puzzle pieces that much bigger, it’s much easier to figure out how they fit together. And so, we’re starting to see changes in people’s DNA that were previously missed because our technology just couldn’t see them. And what we’re finding is that in some of those areas of that genome puzzle, if you will, there’s variation that’s relevant to disease, and we just couldn’t see it before. And it was purely because there was a gap in the technology that couldn’t reveal it to you. And so that’s one of the areas that we are really excited about now is applying this new technology, which again, like this history of genomic started off as a very niche, expensive, difficult, cumbersome process. And it’s now being over time as the efficiency is increasing and the cost is decreasing, our ability to manipulate the data is getting better. And so right now, on the verge of likely over the next few years, we’re going to see a pretty significant transformation in how we sequence a person’s DNA. And that’s likely to give us a pretty exciting boost in our ability to find diagnostic genetic test results. And again, also on the basic research side, it’s very exciting as well. But really, it should be especially impactful in the kind of clinical diagnostic work that we do.
Sarah Sharman 21:35
After sequencing, the long-read data is analyzed by the Cooper lab with the hopes of identifying a disease-causing change in the child’s DNA and giving them a diagnosis. But as we’ve mentioned many times in this episode, rare diseases are rare. And it’s possible that only one or two children in Alabama or the southeast, or even the entire United States have the disease. So, in order to increase their knowledge of these rare diseases, Dr. Cooper’s lab relies on another interesting tool, the internet.
Greg Cooper 22:04
If we find a patient that has a change that we think looks interesting but that we don’t understand because we’ve not seen it before, we will put that into a tool called GeneMatcher. And it really is basically a dating service, if you will, for geneticists, where if somebody else anywhere else in the world, also went to GeneMatcher and said, hey, I’m interested in gene X, and we said we’re interested in gene X, then the computer sends you a note says ‘you two should talk.’ And so, it sends you an email. And we can say we found a second patient. And then as more and more labs do this, we get a third patient and a fourth patient, and a fifth. And so this has become a really powerful way for us to share data all across the world with lots of other labs that are doing similar research, and allow us to find all those connections that would have been missed before. There’s no way we would have known about a child sequenced in Germany or Saudi Arabia or wherever without this kind of data sharing tool driven by these internet connections.
Chris Powell 23:08
Tools can only take you so far without patients to benefit from them. The Cooper lab, through multiple research projects, work with pediatric neurologists and NICU doctors to identify patients who can benefit from DNA sequencing.
Greg Cooper 23:22
One of the more recent projects we’ve worked on is something called SouthSeq. And this is where we said, well, what’s the earliest that you might be able to diagnose? Again, trying to head off this odyssey, trying to prevent all that needless testing. We said, well, a lot of these children actually have problems from the minute they’re born. You can tell that there’s something developmentally unusual happening. So we’ve partnered with neonatal intensive care units or NICUs, all across the southeast. So including UAB and the University of Mississippi, and Women’s Hospital in Baton Rouge and LSU Children’s, and University of Louisville. We said we’re going to work with the neonatologist that are treating babies in the NICU that clearly have a developmental problem. And we’re going to sequence them when they’re just a few days or a couple of weeks old, rather than waiting until they’re three or four or five or 20 and have gone through all those years of kind of futile testing. So we’ve been trying to accelerate the process in terms of identifying the children as early as possible to maximize the benefit to these families, both by avoiding tests that aren’t going to work and also giving them an answer that they can then take to all of their pediatricians in the future and a physician that that child sees they’ll have that diagnosis in their hand, and they’ll know about it, and that might help to make their future clinical interventions much more effective and give the physicians a little bit of extra knowledge to help them make better decisions about treatment. And that it’s not just treatment. It’s things like education, schooling, counseling, speech therapy, all kinds of things where that diagnosis might actually make the ability to provide the best possible care and communication for that child much more effective than it would be if you didn’t have an understanding as to why they are, what the source of their developmental symptoms were.
Greg Cooper 25:16
The fact that we can do that and at least have a small positive impact on some families is really a wonderful feeling. And that’s also the kind of reason that we talk a lot about our successes in diagnosing kids. And we do very often find diagnostic, useful information for families. But often there are many, many families that we don’t find anything for. And that’s what motivates us is we want to give them something useful, right? We want to learn something new that then translates into a diagnostic result for them because we know that it can be such an impactful, important piece of information. And so that’s really what sort of gets us out of bed in the morning is all the families that we haven’t been able to help yet. We’re confident that eventually we’ll be able to help them we just got to do the work to get there. And that’s really what keeps us kind of going is all those families that we think we can help, we just got to do the work to get there.
Sarah Sharman 26:15
We would like to thank the Edwards family for sharing their story with us. If you want to learn more about the E. WE Foundation, including ways to help out. visit their website at theewefoundation.org.
Chris Powell 26:29
Thank you for joining us for this season of Tiny Expeditions. We hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about the role that DNA has in human health and disease.
Sarah Sharman 26:38
We’re going to take a short break as we prepare for season four. But follow us on Twitter at ExpeditionsTiny to continue the conversation about genetics, DNA and inheritance during the break.
Chris Powell 26:49
Tiny Expeditions as a podcast about genetics, DNA, and inheritance from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. We’re a nonprofit research institution in Huntsville, Alabama.
Sarah Sharman 27:00
We’ve got a campus full of scientists doing public research alongside companies developing products and services, all with one aim to translate genomic discoveries into real world applications that make for a healthier, more sustainable world. That’s everything from cancer research to agriculture for a changing climate.
Chris Powell 27:19
If you find this podcast interesting, please rate, review, like, and subscribe on the podcast app of your choice. And tell someone that you listen to this interesting little story about genetics. Knowledge is better when you share it.
Sarah Sharman 27:32
Thanks again to our sponsor, EBSCO Information Services. And thanks to you our listeners for joining us.
