Trainee Newsletter

Nascent Transcript Author: Allison McCague, PhD In June of 2019, H.R. 3235, the “Access to Genetic Counselor Services Act of 2019” was introduced in the House of Representatives. For the genetic counseling community, the passage of this legislation would represent a landmark achievement for access to genetic counseling services, but the bill has yet to move... Read More

Nascent Transcript Author: Anna Miller With “Stay at Home” orders in effect and the slow process of reopening, we spoke with Simona Mkrtschjan, a Clinical Social Worker at Case Western Reserve University, in late April about navigating our mental health. Some people struggle with feeling like they’re not accomplishing enough each day. How do we... Read More

Nascent Transcript Author: Anna Miller A recent decision by the pharmaceutical company Novartis to provide 100 free gene therapy treatments for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a debilitating yet rare genetic condition, to patients selected through a lottery program has sparked debate about the ethical implications. SMA is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder caused by... Read More

Nascent Transcript Author: Nicole Ferraro Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has allowed millions to directly interact with their genetic data and test results. This presents largely uncharted avenues in which our work as geneticists interacts with the public. A recent example involved a genome-wide association study1 that produced a polygenic risk score explaining <1% of variance... Read More

Nascent Transcript Writer: Jeff Calhoun Due to the reduced cost of next-generation sequencing and the demonstrated utility of genetic diagnoses, more and more individuals are having their genes, exomes, and even genomes sequenced in a clinical setting. This testing ranges widely from gene panels to identify cancer subtypes, to array Comparative Genomic Hybridization to identify... Read More