Actionability of commercial laboratory sequencing panels for newborn screening and the importance of transparency for parental decision-making.

Background: Newborn screening aims to identify individual patients who could benefit from early management, treatment, and/or surveillance practices. As sequencing technologies have progressed and we move into the era of precision medicine, genomic sequencing has been introduced to this area with the hopes of detecting variants related to a vastly expanded number of conditions. Though implementation of genomic sequencing for newborn screening in public health and clinical settings is limited, commercial laboratories have begun to offer genomic screening panels for neonates.

An Age-Based Framework for Evaluating Genome-Scale Sequencing Results in Newborn Screening.

Objective: To assess the performance of a standardized, age-based metric for scoring clinical actionability to evaluate conditions for inclusion in newborn screening and compare it with the results from other contemporary methods.

Study Design: The North Carolina Newborn Exome Sequencing for Universal Screening study developed an age-based, semiquantitative metric to assess the clinical actionability of gene-disease pairs and classify them with respect to age of onset or timing of interventions. This categorization was compared with the gold standard Recommended Uniform Screening Panel and other methods to evaluate gene-disease pairs for newborn genomic sequencing.