López-Martín, E.; Martínez-Delgado, B.; Bermejo-Sánchez, E.; Alonso, J.; the SpainUDP Network; Posada, M. SpainUDP: The Spanish Undiagnosed Rare Diseases Program. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2018, 15, 1746.
López-Martín, E.; Martínez-Delgado, B.; Bermejo-Sánchez, E.; Alonso, J.; the SpainUDP Network; Posada, M. SpainUDP: The Spanish Undiagnosed Rare Diseases Program. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15, 1746.
López-Martín, E.; Martínez-Delgado, B.; Bermejo-Sánchez, E.; Alonso, J.; the SpainUDP Network; Posada, M. SpainUDP: The Spanish Undiagnosed Rare Diseases Program. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2018, 15, 1746.
López-Martín, E.; Martínez-Delgado, B.; Bermejo-Sánchez, E.; Alonso, J.; the SpainUDP Network; Posada, M. SpainUDP: The Spanish Undiagnosed Rare Diseases Program. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2018, 15, 1746.
Abstract
One of the IRDiRC goals for 2017-2027 is to achieve definitive diagnosis for rare undiagnosed diseases within one year, as diagnosis delay remains one of the pending issues in the rare diseases field. The Spanish Undiagnosed Rare Diseases Program (SpainUDP) was created in response to this challenging scenario to cover patients’ needs and after seeing the success of the UDP in USA. SpainUDP offers a multidisciplinary approach to those patients who have long sought a diagnosis without any success. During a first phase of the protocol, undiagnosed cases are sent to SpainUDP by individual patients, patient organizations or hospitals. After a carefully analysis of phenotype, data from sequencing experiments (WES) is processed with a standard pipeline and a detailed standardized phenotypic information (mapped to HPO) is connected to genetic data. In addition, the participation of SpainUDP in international initiatives such as the European projects RD-Connect and Solve RD, the Undiagnosed Diseases Network International (UDNI), and the MatchMaker Exchange platform, allows the establishment of a global data sharing strategy across multiple projects submitting data to these international initiatives. From the official beginning of the program (at the end of 2015) until early 2018, 147 cases were accepted in SpainUDP. During this time, 37 cases (25 %) dropped out the program due to several reasons. The remaining 110 cases are distributed as follows: phenotypic and genotypic (WES) characterization was finished in 30 cases, of which 20 (67 %) were diagnosed; 21 cases are pending on variants validation by Sanger; in 25 cases, WES is ongoing and 34 cases are in a deep phenotypic characterization. As a conclusion, SpainUDP aims to achieve a diagnosis following two recommendations of the IRDiRC: the patients’ diagnosis in a period of time as short as possible and the promotion of data sharing (especially genomic) at the international level.
Keywords
Diagnosis delay; rare diseases; undiagnosed programs; standardized phenotype; phenotype ontologies; whole exome analysis; international data sharing
Subject
Medicine and Pharmacology, Clinical Medicine
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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