Health committee  I would agree with Dr. Johnson. It is difficult. There are so many other factors involved. We know 13 or 14 different conditions that are very similar to thalidomide, and you can genetically test for some of those, but not all of them. We don't know. Embryonically, we're still un

Health committee  Yes. There is no genetic test to say you are definitely. There are tests that could rule out other conditions that are phenocopies of thalidomide, but there's no test that says you are definitively thalidomide.

Health committee  At the present time, the funding into research on thalidomide embryopathy and the way the drug acts on the embryo is pretty much at zero. There's very little interest in doing that research, because the drug is no longer, in our countries anyway, used in situations that might cau

Health committee  I'm not sure what the question is. Are you asking if we can rule out thalidomide embryopathy or if we can rule it in?

Health committee  The genetic testing that's available right now is for only a few conditions, and these are phenocopies of thalidomide, such as how arms intergrow, and a few others. These are limb reduction deformities, and you can use those definitely to say, “Yes, this is not thalidomide.” If a

Health committee  Claus Newman, one of the doctors who is working with the Thalidomide Trust, classified thalidomide embryopathy as a syndrome, a collection of conditions that are independently seen. If you see a combination of those conditions and the patient is of the right age and has had some

Health committee  I'll answer that a different way. There are phenocopies of thalidomide embryopathy, so there are genetic conditions that look very similar to thalidomide embryopathy, such as Holt-Oram syndrome, and Okihiro syndrome. We can now genetically test for those, so we can now discount t

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  There's a group in Brazil, Lavinia Schuler-Faccini's lab, and she's actually looking at thalidomide survivors—adult and youth patients. Right now, they're doing genetic screening in those patients to try to identify which genes may be affected in thalidomide survivors. Hopefully,

Health committee  Thank you. I'm a developmental biologist. I'm a scientist, not a clinician. I've been studying how thalidomide acts on the embryo for the last 15 years. The drug itself is quite complicated. It exists as enantiomer, which means it can exist in two different forms in the body. O