Achievement

IGERT trainee Jonathan Dreyfuss is author in:

Dreyfuss JM, Levner D, Galagan JE, Church GM, Ramoni MF. How accurate can genetic predictions be? BMC Genomics. 2012 July 24;13:340.

Pre-symptomatic prediction of disease and drug response based on genetic testing is a critical component of personalized medicine. The predictive capacity of genetic testing is constrained by the heritability and prevalence of the tested trait. Here, we mathematically derive the absolute limits that these factors impose on test accuracy in the absence of any distributional assumptions on risk. We present these limits in terms of the best-case ROC curve (receiver-operating characteristic), and the AUC (area under the curve) measure of accuracy. We apply our method to genetic prediction of type 2 diabetes and breast cancer, and we additionally show the best possible accuracy that can be obtained from integrated predictors, which can incorporate non-genetic features.