With a career that started at NASA and ended with engineering software for genomics research, Duke patient Sharon is not shy about her passion for science and the value of scientific research.
It should come as no surprise then that when, during an appointment at the Duke Cardiac Catheterization Lab, she was asked to join the OneDukeGen study, she was all in.
OneDukeGen is a precision medicine study that will analyze DNA from 150,000 consented Duke patients to make scientific discoveries focused on improving the health and well-being of Duke patients.
“I’m going to support [research] studies,” Sharon said, “because it’s us as a species acquiring knowledge and new technologies. The advancements we make are what makes us great.”
The genomics aspect of the study especially interested Sharon. Before retirement, she worked as a software engineer, at a clinical trial laboratory. She wrote the code necessary to build pipelines that analyzed genomic sequencing data. The goal of the research was to identify specific genes that could help oncologists select the appropriate medicines for patients.
“I was a ‘code slinger,’ just building pipelines and getting them to run effectively and efficiently,” Sharon said, “but I got a chance to learn a lot about genomics, and I thought it was such an interesting world.”
Sharon sees the future of medicine as personalized and sees OneDukeGen as a step in that direction. Her hope for the future is to see people getting medications not only customized to their specific conditions but also to the individual so there is less trial and error and better health outcomes for all patients. “It may sound far out, but we have such clever people working on things,” she said. “The first step is to dream it and then watch those people achieve it,”
About OneDukeGen
There is still a lot that we don’t understand about the connections between DNA and health. The more we study our DNA, the more we will learn what gene variants mean about us. As part of the Center for Precision Health within the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and in partnership with nference, a science-first software company, OneDukeGen will use genetics and precision medicine to make scientific discoveries focused on improving the health and well-being of Duke patients. The team aims to enroll at least 150,000 Duke patients and research study participants. The more people who join, the better chance we have of finding new gene variants and understanding what the ones we already know about mean to our health.