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The councilor of Health Galician, Antonio Gómez Caamañoand the executive director of the Galician Public Foundation of Xenomics Medicine, Angel Carracedohave supervised this Monday the act of taking samples of the project ‘Xenoma Galicia‘, the “most important scientific initiative in the history of Galicia” that begins a new phase and seeks to “revolutionize” precision medicine by analyzing the DNA of 5,000 Galicians to find their predisposition to different types of cancer.
For the moment, the project has started in the health area of Santiago e Barbanza, with the random appointment of more than 800 people who, after signing the informed consent through the Sergas app, go to the Clinical Hospital to obtain the blood sample.
As Carracedo explained to the media, in addition to being an “important” scientific project, it is at the same time a screening project to see the predisposition to breast, ovarian, colorectal cancer and hypercholesterolemia.
“This is going to mean a very important revolution in health, fundamentally, but also in strategic sectors such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology,” he noted.
The most important thing, he continued, are the “direct repercussions” it will have to make personalized medicine “more effective.” “This is going to be a strategy for the medicine of the future, getting ahead of the disease,” Carracedo insisted, given that, although the person mentioned may not develop the disease even if a mutation is found that predisposes him, allows “personalized” prevention.
Carracedo thanked the work of the research team and especially the participants. “It is difficult for them to come from distant places to donate and they do it fundamentally for the love of science. And that is beautiful because it means that Galicians are very supportive and understand the value of contributing to the advancement of science,” he highlighted.
The goal: 400,000 samples
The researcher has advanced that, in the future, the objective would be obtain 400,000 DNA samplesmaking the project number one in terms of population, since the most important project of this type in the world is from the United Kingdom, with 500,000 samples. “Trying to get 400,000 samples in a population of 2.7 million would be another dimension,” he commented.
For his part, the Minister of Health has also claimed the “pioneer” nature of the initiative, emphasizing the “great value” that its results will have “for advancing in areas such as preventive and personalized medicine.”
For this reason, he has encouraged everyone who receives his invitation, via SMS, to participate.
This new phase, he explained, begins with the collection of 5,000 new samples throughout Galicia. In the Santiago e Barbanza health area, a total of 828 appointments have been made available for collection. Specifically, 703 in Santiago and 125 in Barbanza.
This continues with an initiative that in its initial phase analyzed 2,000 biological samples of blood and saliva. These studies allowed the detection of 24 risk variants associated with different hereditary pathologies.
Voluntary participation
Participation in the project is completely voluntary, but A prior invitation from the Xunta’s health department is necessary. In this way, in each of its phases, randomly selected people will receive an SMS message on their mobile phone with an invitation and information about the program.
After this, participants must request their appointment through the Sergas Móvil application. Appointments are available from Monday to Thursday in the afternoon. The health personnel will inform the participants and will carry out a blood sample extraction, without the need to come on an empty stomach.
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