Moneyball Medicine

Rapid and cheap DNA sequencing technology can tell us a lot about which genes a patient is carrying around, but it can't tell us when and where the instructions in those genes get carried out inside cells. Resolve Biosciences—headed by this week's guest, Jason Gammack—aims to solve that problem by scaling up a form of intracellular imaging it calls molecular cartography.Gammack says the technology offers a high-resolution way to see the geography of gene transcription in single cells, that is, where specific messenger RNA molecules congregate once they’ve left the nucleus. The technology can trace up to 100 gene transcripts simultaneously. Right now it only works for mRNA, but the company says it plans to add the ability to track DNA, proteins, and “metabolic data layers.” The big idea is to make it easier to see how gene expression translates into normal tissue development and, by extension, the pathology of genetic or infectious diseases."We can go in and identify specific RNA molecules that code for a know