Prof. Wolf's Research Impacts U.S. & U.K. Policy on Genomics

Professor Susan Wolf's work on return of results and incidental findings has made significant new impacts. On March 31, the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council—the major funders of biomedical research in the U.K.—published a new "Framework on the Feedback of Health-Related Findings in Research." Its first cite is to NIH-supported work on these issues led by Wolf. The framework goes on to discuss her project's three-tier approach. This new framework will impact all research supported by the Wellcome Trust and MRC. On March 27, Wolf participated in a plenary panel on these issues at the annual meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) in Nashville, where ACMG announced a major improvement in policy. The panel reexamined the controversial policy on incidental findings that ACMG had published a year ago. A Science piece by Wolf and two coauthors had criticized the ACMG approach for requiring analysis of 56 extra genes whenever clinical sequencing is performed, with no opt-out for patients. After Thursday's panel in Nashville, ACMG announced that its Board had decided to change ACMG policy to provide an opt-out to allow patient choice.