Nigerian wins U.S. award with fast DNA sequencing for medical tests

A NIGERIAN scientist, Mr. Yemi Adesokan, has been recognised by the Technology Review magazine as one of the TR35 Honouree Award recipients for 2011.Technology Review is an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States.The TR35 recognises the world's top innovators under the age of 35, spanning energy, medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology and other emerging fields.Thirty-four-year-old Adesokan, who is also the founder of Pathogenica Inc., was selected as a member of the TR35 class of 2011 by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, who evaluated more than 300 nominations.He is being honoured for his work in the application of next generation sequencing to clinical diagnostics. He joined other TR35 honourees in discussing their achievements at the Emtech MIT 2011 conference, which took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge on Tuesday October 18 to 19, 2011.It is believed that the diagnostic tests being developed by Adesokan and his company could let physicians quickly and cheaply pinpoint features of a patient's infection, such as whether it is resistant to certain antibiotics and prescribe the most effective treatment.In 2009, as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, Adesokan cofounded a startup called Pathogenica with the goal of developing commercial applications of DNA-sequencing technologies.Adesokan, the CEO, expects to create a market for tests that use sequencing to detect the microbes behind infections. To identify these pathogens today, scientists must use expensive DNA tests or grow the microbes from a sample'a slow process that doesn't work for many bacteria. And both methods often fail to detect small differences in DNA that can have a huge impact on the organism's virulence and resistance to drugs.'Pathogenica's technology can pick out specific regions of a pathogen's genome, such as the genes involved in its ability to infect its host, and sequence many of these regions simultaneously. It minimises the amount of sequencing, so Pathogenica's approach will be cheaper, faster and more precise than existing tests,' says Adesokan.Pathogenica's initial efforts have focused on detecting the microbes that cause urinary-tract infections. Its researchers are also developing tests to analyse how microbe populations change when someone is treated with new antibiotics or antivirals. Because the technology can detect small changes in DNA, it may be able to reveal early on if a population of microbes is developing resistance to a drug.
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