Welcome to week 3

Hello again. I’m Dr. Catherine Millington-Sanders. Welcome to week three of Genomic Scenarios in Primary Care. This week, we’re going to look at two new areas of genomic medicine, the phenomenon of direct-to-consumer testing, and the use of genomics in the management of infectious diseases. To help us learn more about these areas, I would like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Debbie Hipps. Hi. I’m Debbie Hipps. I’m a GP Trainer in South London with an interest in genomics. I’m going to guide you this week through what we need to understand in primary care in order to be able to manage those patients who present to us with results from genomic tests that have been marketed to them Direct-to-the-Consumer, or DTC.

Many of these patients will present to their primary care team having bought a kit online. They may have received little or no genetic counselling and present with results of variable quantity and quality that they want us to explain. It’s important that health care professionals presented with these results have working knowledge of what they mean and how to manage them. So the aim of the first part of this week is to help us non-experts to develop a framework for analysing these DTC results. This will then allow us to be able to develop management plans for these patients. We’re going to be discussing some case scenarios and chatting to some experts in the field about the issues raised.

In the second part of this week, we are going to be looking at how genomics can be used in infectious disease management. This will include how genomics can help with tracking a disease outbreak, how it can assist with vaccine development, and how pharmacogenomics can be used to guide treatment options. We’ll be looking at the current coronavirus pandemic and some of the ways genomics is helping to guide strategy. Thank you, Debbie. That sounds like it will be really interesting and useful. As always, please let us know how you get on by participating in the discussion sections, and we really hope you enjoy this final week of our course.