The Benefits of Qatar Genome Programme’s New Partnership

Predictive genomics is an important topic that can help predict disease risk and evaluate treatment outcomes.

Qatar Genome Program (QGP), a Qatar Foundation (QF) member, and Thermo Fisher Scientific have partnered to expedite genomic research and clinical applications of predictive genomics in Qatar.

This is the first step toward promoting precision medicine's benefits to Arab populations around the world. The Middle East has long served as a historic crossroads for human civilization and migration. Large-scale evaluations of the region's diversity and disease risk among Arab populations have been hampered due to a paucity of whole-genome data from the region.

Previous studies including hundreds of people shed information on the history of these communities as well as the impact of high consanguinity and tribalism on the occurrence of genetic disorders.

Partnership with Thermo Fisher

Based on whole-genome sequencing data from 19 Arab countries, Thermo Fisher and the Qatar Genome Program will work to create an Axiom custom genotypic array for pan-Arab populations.

The array, which has over 800,000 variants, aims to help scientists better understand diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, autism, inherited genetic disorders, and cancer.

Although there have been no occurrences of monkeypox in Qatar, there are still things to be aware of:

The arrangement, which will be available through Thermo Fisher's global commercial channels in late 2022, is intended to be a less expensive option to whole genome sequencing for Arab populations, allowing for more diversity in huge genome-wide research projects.

Thermo Fisher cooperated with the Qatar Genome Program to create the first microarray designed specifically for Qataris in 2018. The Q-Chip detects genetic alterations that put people at risk for a variety of diseases, both common and uncommon.

The organizations will continue to improve algorithms and develop clinically actionable material to assess polygenic risk scores, a measure of disease risk, and clinically relevant variants, particularly those related to pharmacogenomics, under the rules of the new cooperation.

Qatar's population is an important part of the Arab Peninsula due to its history and physical location.

Despite the fact that the Human Genome Project has continually increased sequence fidelity, the genome's immense complexity makes it challenging to detect related or ultimately causal variants. Besides, a large number of genetic loci implicated in the study are predicted to have minor impacts.

Predictive genomics aims to achieve a variety of short and long-term goals. All subsequent attempts targeted at improving data-cum-knowledge results are built on the discovery of linked variances.