Chromo Sapiens

Project Website

Inspiration

UBC estimates that adverse drug responses in Canada costs $15 billion as well as up to 22 000 in lives. There are also potentially life-saving medications that doctors are reluctant or restricted from giving out because they are lethal to small percentages of the population. Many cancer therapies are so dangerous because genetic variations affect drug concentrations in the body and can kill patients. We wanted to do something to personalize medicine, and with the price of human genome sequencing falling exponentially, we saw that it would soon be very feasible to sequence everyone's DNA and use that information to tailor accurate dosing information for each person which will save money as well as save lives.

What it does

Our project analyzes a patient's genome to accurately determine a recommended dosage for codeine. The app takes into account the individual's genome, gender, age, height, weight and whether they are pregnant.

How we built it

We built a web-app for our project that received Genome Data for a patient. The data is then analyzed for certain mutation to determine the patient's metabolization ability of the drug. This information is subsequently used to accurately determine a recommend dosage.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges with our implementation of the web app. The size of the data needed to be analyzed was initially unknown. As a result, we went through various potential strategies. We faced various challenges with PHP and decided to switch to JavaScript. In terms of the biomedical aspect, we quickly realized that scientists do not have standardized methods of reading Genome data. This resulted in several set-backs and created difficulty when determining mutation sequences. As a result, we had to determine a standardized method of reading this data for our program.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud that we were able to complete a functional web app that can effectively determine codeine dosage.

What we learned

We learn various new skills in implementing web-apps. To begin with, we were able to advance our skills in PHP and JavaScript and learn more about databases, although they weren't implemented in our final product.