How could DNA improve our health? Prof. Justin O'Connor advocates sequencing the genomes of all the 60,000 children born in NZ each year. A highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar series.

How do we use DNA information to be healthier and live longer?

The answer is simple, according to Professor Justin M. O'Sullivan from the Liggins Institute - sequence the genomes of all children in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Professor O'Sullivan explains the benefits of his proposal in this highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Series.

Listen to the talk

(Webinar available soon on the RTBHE website)

Edited highlights from the discussion

How do we tap the untapped potential of our DNA to personalise your health care and extend your life? The answer is actually relatively simple, and that is that we need to change the way we think about health care. What we need to do is move from a system that tries to correct or cure a disease to a system that focused on prevention using full patient participation. How do we do that?

For many of us, it's a bit late to make a huge difference because the diseases that are going to kill you have already started developing. You just can't see the symptoms yet.

The answer to what we should do is sequence the genomes of all of our children. Not a representative few, not most, but all. It's not going to help you, but it is going to help them, and I'll explain why.

There are 60,000 children born a year in New Zealand, and 24 machines running analysis for 24 hours a day for seven days a week would do this. As a result, we'd get DNA sequences, we'd get epigenetic marks (which are the signals from the environment) from all of those individuals in one run. All 60,000 born in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The materials to sequence these genomes would cost $60 million. By comparison, the human genome project took thirteen years and cost US$3 billion dollars to do just one individual. So we've moved on. Things are faster, and we can do this.

I'm not saying this is simple. There'll be hiccups that come along the way but eventually, over the course of a couple of years, it would become business as usual. It would impact lives in ways that we have very little understanding of now. They would be very positive impacts.

Now before you say, "We can't do that - it's not ethical," we've already run very exhaustive tests on children, such as the Guthrie test. This looks at metabolites in their blood, it's done on all children and it helps saves thousands of kids…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details