A couple on a first date hold their smartphones together, and instantly determine what their children would look like – or whether the kids might be predisposed to genetic disease.
The scene is imaginary, but might not be for long. Computer scientists at UC
A couple on a first date hold their smartphones together, and instantly determine what their children would look like – or whether the kids might be predisposed to genetic disease.
The scene is imaginary, but might not be for long. Computer scientists at UC Irvine have devised a smartphone app that can store your DNA – and perhaps one day allow your date, your relatives or your doctor to scan it.
Think instant medical diagnosis. Or a rapid-fire paternity test, something the scientists actually did in less than half a second while trying out the new application.
“There are some really cool possibilities,” said UCI computer science professor Gene Tsudik. “I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg.”
The app is called GenoDroid. Its biggest innovation, Tsudik said, is security encryption, allowing the exchange of information about segments of a person’s DNA without revealing the DNA code itself.
“In the end, the only thing they find out is, match or no match,” Tsudik said. “They don’t find out anything else. Your genome still remains your private property.”
But before some of the application’s more intriguing possible uses can be attempted, technology will have to catch up.
For a fee, some companies will send you a digitized version of your genome from, say, a cheek swab. But today’s smartphones do not have the capacity to store the massive amounts of information required to capture an entire human genome.
“We’ll be able to do that in three or four years, to be conservative,” Tsudik said.
For now, the GenoDroid app is capable of uploading a relevant section of the genome to be used for comparison with someone else’s.
A “toy” version of the application is available online for free.
“It allows you and another person to exchange some encrypted information and find out, with almost absolute certainty, whether one is the father of the other,” Tsudik said.
The dating example is mostly tongue-in-cheek, he said, although it is among the real possibilities.
“Imagine, in five to 10 years, people sit in a bar, speed-dating, hold up their phones, and try to figure out how much common ancestry they have, or whether potential offspring might have high chances for certain abnormalities,” he said.
Some, he said, might find such possibilities “a bit disconcerting.”
“This is not something I would personally advocate,” he said.
The application also could have a broad variety of medical uses.
Segments of DNA could to be scanned for diseases like Huntington’s, or certain forms of mental illness.
A patient could bring a smartphone to the doctor’s office, or the hospital, to allow physicians to customize treatments for cancer and other maladies based on the patient’s DNA.
The encryption technology, meanwhile, would ensure that only a small section of DNA would be revealed at a time, the rest remaining secure.
That could accelerate development of “personalized medicine,” in which treatment is tailor-made for individual patients based on their genetic code.
Patients would not have to worry about an insurance company cutting them off after scanning their genomes for health problems.
And drug companies could be free of fears that proprietary treatments would be revealed to competitors – for example, which genetic markers they were using to determine whether the patient’s DNA was compatible with a customized treatment.
The encryption would make the exchange between patient and doctor “double blind,” with only the test results revealed.
“Our claim to fame is privacy,” Tsudik said. “They want to see what part of your genome matches one of your drug markers, but they don’t want to reveal it to you. And you don’t want to reveal your entire genome to them, either.”
Find the “toy” version at play.google.com/storeapps/details?id=com.fatherfinder&hl=en
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