Melbourne Genomics' Clinical Bioinformatics and Genomics Project Manager, Dr Natalie Thorne, was recently invited to take the stage at a gala dinner for the Melbourne-Boston Sister Cities Association. Natalie was interviewed by ABC News24 Breakfast program presenter Michael Rowland, to speak about her work and her travel to Boston last year as the City of Melbourne Hugh Rogers Fellow in Health Care and Medical Research.
Natalie said: "I really valued the opportunity to work with Daniel MacArthur and his colleagues at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital, and bring that knowledge back to our project here in Melbourne. They have genomic data from over 60,000 people - the largest resource of its kind. Until recently, there were only smaller datasets such as the '1000 genomes' project, so this is a big leap forward. While I was there I learnt about research into understanding the parts of our genes that naturally vary among people, compared to the parts that don't tolerate changes. If we can understand this better, we can improve our ability to diagnose patients with genetic disorders, so it's great that we have connections with the group in Boston who are working on this."
The Sister Cities gala dinner was attended by around 180 people from business, industry, education, the arts and medical research with an interest in Melbourne-Boston relations.
Image: Natalie Thorne (centre) in conversation on stage at the gala (image courtesy of the Melbourne-Boston Sister Cities Association).