In a win for open data, leading diagnostics company Ambry Genetics is releasing genomic information from 10,000 patients with breast and ovarian cancer in a free, public database open to researchers studying hereditary links to these diseases and others.
Dubbed AmbryShare, the database contains anonymized information from patients who had previously used the company’s diagnostic genetic tests, which are designed to spot certain abnormalities or mutations in a person’s DNA that make them at higher risk for certain diseases. The data dump contains no identifying information from the patients, who consented to their test samples being used for research. What makes this information useful to scientists is that it shows the allele frequency, or the percentage of people with a specific gene mutation, with hereditary breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
