The ability to utilize biospecimens collected at the time of birth for research that integrates genetic variation, social and environmental exposures, and health outcomes may be an invaluable resource in promoting epigenetic approaches to disease prevention and health promotion. There are a growing number of perinatal biobanks in the US and globally, including many focused on preventing prematurity, specific childhood conditions, or birth defects.

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) requests financial support to partially defray speaker and participant travel expenses for an "Ancestry Inference Roundtable" to be held in May, 2012, in Chicago, IL. This meeting will build on an earlier ASHG position statement (ASHG, 2008) and the recommendations of an ASHG ancestry task force, which were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics (Royal et al., 2010).

Personalized medicine (PM) has the potential to transform medicine and the health care system over the next decade. An overlooked variable that will play an important role in the implementation of PM is the potential for legal liability. Physicians, a key gatekeeper in the uptake of PM, are at the greatest risk of liability. Currently, there is great uncertainty, disagreement and rapid change with regard to the use of PM tests in clinical care.

The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) and Return of Results Consortium (RoRC) programs are designed to investigate critical questions about the application of genomic sequencing to clinical care of individual patients, from generation of genomic sequence data, to interpretation and translation of the data for the physician, to communication to the patient, including an examination of the ethical and psychosocial implications of bringing broad genomic data into the clinic.

The purpose of this study is to provide empirical data on effects of intellectual property (IP) and commercialization on clinical translation of noninvasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) and identify potential barriers to clinical adoption and patient access. Advances in technologies for genetic analysis of cell-free fetal DNA could make NIPT routine. Early clinical trials indicate that sequencing-based NIPT tests for chromosomal aneuploidies are more accurate than currently used noninvasive screening tests.

Genomic information offers the opportunity for "personalized prevention" in both clinical practice and public health settings. To date, such efforts have focused primarily on chronic diseases and their behavioral risk factors. We propose an exploratory CEER to study the ethical, legal, social and policy (ELSP) issues arising in the novel and timely context of infectious disease.

Harvesting the benefits of genomics requires a new kind of transdisciplinary cooperation. Over the next three years, we will create the Center for Transdisciplinary ELSI Research in Translational Genomics (CT2G) to address key ELSI questions in translational research. The proposed Center brings together the unique resources of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), including its Division of Research, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), including the Hastings College of the Law Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy.

This application proposes the establishment of a Center for Research on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic and Behavioral (PNB) Genetics at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). Since April 2010, we have been funded under a P20 Developing Center grant to create the infrastructure and begin development of such a Center.

Recent progress in genomic science has been accompanied by great expectations that we are on the verge of a medical revolution where genetic knowledge of the complex interaction between multiple genes and the environmental/behavioral factors impacting their expression, will redefine illness and health, guiding risk prediction, disease diagnosis and treatment strategies. As yet, with a few notable exceptions, the promise of genetically driven diagnoses and treatment remains largely theoretical.

This application seeks to better understand the needs of patients undergoing genomic testing with respect to the understanding of an adaptation to genomic information through genomic counseling. Through an existing partnership between the Ohio State University Medical Center and the Coriell Institute's Personalized Medicine Collaborative, over 5000 participants have been enrolled in two studies aimed at evaluating the utility of personalized medicine.