World leading glaucoma risk prediction
Understanding glaucoma risk
Seonix Bio is dedicated to helping health professionals, individuals and researchers understand glaucoma risk using genetics.
prediction
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Glaucoma
Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that cause progressive vision loss by damaging the optic nerve. Glaucoma progression is often gradual and individuals may not realise they are losing peripheral vision until optic nerve damage has occurred1.
Genetic risk scores
Genetic testing is widely used to assess the risk of diseases caused by changes in a single gene. However, many diseases – including glaucoma – are polygenic, that is they are influenced by a large number of genetic variants scattered throughout the genome. Genetic risk scores are a powerful new approach that combine the effects of hundreds or thousands of these variants to predict an individual’s disease risk and how it compares to others in a population.
A genetic risk score for glaucoma
We have developed a genetic risk score service for glaucoma, called SightScoreTM. Glaucoma is well suited for genetic risk score analysis due to its high heritability. Our approach has been published in world leading journals such as Nature Genetics2 and JAMA Ophthalmology3 and was developed using some of the world’s most extensive glaucoma patient sample collections. Our approach has since been significantly improved. It has been associated with a range of clinically relevant measures associated with glaucoma risk.
Our genetic risk score can be calculated using a simple, saliva-based testing approach.
A range of applications
Our SightScoreTM service will be offered to health professionals, and can potentially be used for:
- Individuals to understand their glaucoma risk so they can be proactive about their healthcare.
- Healthcare professionals to develop preventative risk mitigating strategies for glaucoma, potentially including increased monitoring for those at higher risk to help detect any signs of glaucoma early.
- Research studies, for example to support pharmaceutical development.
Our genetic risk score is currently available for research use only, with health and clinical services in development.
References
1. Glaucoma Australia. https://glaucoma.org.au/
2. Craig, J.E et. al (2020). Multitrait analysis of glaucoma identifies new risk loci and enables polygenic prediction of disease susceptibility and progression. Nature Genetics.
3. Siggs, O.M. et al. (2021). Association of Monogenic and Polygenic Risk With the Prevalence of Open-Angle Glaucoma. JAMA Ophthalmol.