Teddy Drivas 🏳️‍🌈 (he/him)

Racial and socioeconomic disparities in genetic evaluation and testing in the adult patient population This study of over 14,000 adults in two major health systems reveals striking racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to genetics evaluation and testing. Black individuals and those from disadv...

📣New from @tdrivas.bsky.social & co!
📄Racial and socioeconomic disparities in genetic evaluation and testing in the adult patient population

The perils of being a #geneticist — when I look at my adorable nephew’s bath towel, all I see is a vaso-occlusive crisis waiting to happen…

Practice-Based Insights into Adult Genetics: High Diagnostic Yield, Demographic Determinants, and Patterns of Test Utilization in Over 7,000 Patients Precision medicine increasingly relies on genetic testing for individualized care, yet the practice patterns of genetic evaluation in adults remain under-characterized and few guidelines exist to info...

We built the first practice-level map of adult genomic medicine, showing high yield (>30% for exome!), rising demand & a clear need for updated guidelines to ensure testing is accessible, reimbursable, and routine.
Preprint 👉 bit.ly/3L9euh9

🏥Wed (Poster 3010W) - I’ll present our clinical work on how #AdultGenetics care is organized and delivered in over 8,000 adult patient visits over 8 years. We chart referral patterns, testing use & outcomes across indications, revealing how #PrecisionMedicine is practiced today.

📊Fri (Poster 4909F) - Yunjun Kang applied #GraphTheory & #MachineLearning to find hidden gene-gene links in big human data, identifying 2 novel cilium genes that validated in the wet lab; his approach could change how we uncover mechanism & therapeutic targets in human datasets

🧪Thurs (Poster 5047T) - Ekta Singh shows how different nutritional states reshape primary #cilia, altering how cells sense and respond to external cues. Her thesis work will have important implications both for rare #ciliopathy patients and for common complex disease!

🧬 Thrilled to be at #ASHG2025 with my students Ekta Singh & Yunjun Kang who are sharing incredible science out of our lab on #cilia, #metabolism, #genetics & #MachineLearning - and to present my own new clinical data on #AdultGenetics. Come say hi!

#ASHG #genetics #genomics

Yesterday at lab meeting we went around the table with introductions for a new student. Of the 7 people in attendance, I was the only one born in the USA. Diversity and immigration are what make America, and Science, great, and my heart breaks watching these pillars of our greatness crumble.

New research out in @ajhgnews.bsky.social suggests that the implementation of genetic testing in critically ill adults has the potential to improve patient care & combat healthcare delivery disparities ft Colleen Kripke & @tdrivas.bsky.social‬ (@pennmedicine.bsky.social) www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

🔗 Check out the full paper:
www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

📢 Read the Science coverage:
www.science.org/content/arti...

💙 Excited to keep pushing this conversation forward!

Huge thanks to our amazing team, patients, and families who made this possible. We hope these data inform broader conversations about when and for whom genetic testing should be routine — not just for children, but for adults too.

Genetic testing of critically ill adults can yield surprises—and reveal disparities in treatment of Black patients Adults in the ICU often don’t know about the genetic diagnoses related to their symptoms, DNA sequencing study shows

We’re super grateful to see our work amplified by @sciencenews.bsky.social , which covered our study’s implications for ICU practice, surprise diagnoses, and what must change for genetic testing to help more adults.

📰 Read the feature:
www.science.org/content/arti...

Our study also uncovered concerning disparities: Black patients were significantly less likely than White patients to be aware of their genetic diagnosis, and this was linked to higher mortality rate, potentially contributing to worse ICU outcomes for Black patients.

Key finding: Nearly 1 in 4 critically ill young adults age 18-40 had a genetic diagnosis directly related to their illness; half of these diagnoses were unknown to the patients or their doctors. This is a wake-up call for how we think about genetic disease in adult medicine.

Exclusion-based exome sequencing in critically ill adults 18–40 years old has a 24% diagnostic rate and finds racial disparities in access to genetic testing In ICU-admitted adults 18–40 years old, exome sequencing, a broad genetic test examining all protein-coding genes, reveals a diagnosis in 24.4% of patients and significant race-based disparities. This...

#genetic testing can reveal life-altering diagnoses — but it’s rarely offered to adults in the #ICU. We asked: How often do genetic conditions underlie critical illness? What do these findings mean for patient care, #disparities, and health outcomes?

📄 AJHG: www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

Thrilled to share that our latest study on genetic testing in critically ill adults at @pennmedicine.bsky.social is now published in The American Journal of Human Genetics (@ajhgnews.bsky.social) -- and was featured in
@sciencenews.bsky.social!

That’s awesome! Let’s us know if you have any thoughts or feedback after the discussion!

I learned a lot working on this project: (1) rare genetic variants can be surprisingly common and affect risk for common diseases like breast cancer (2) mosaicism is important and we need to be paying more attention to it as a research community (3) collaborations introduce you to fantastic people!

We believe much of this can be explained by somatic mosaicism in the PV-Only group — our data suggests that many of these patients only have their NF1 variant in some of their cells. This might explain why they lack Neurofibromatosis features, but still carry an increased cancer risk.

Importantly, only about half of these patients have features of Neurofibromatosis on exam. However, even in the absence of Neurofibromatosis features, patients with NF1 pathogenic variants (the PV-Only group) were found to have a 50% increased odds of having a cancer diagnosis.

This was a mega-collaboration using data from the PennMedicine Biobank @pennmedicine.bsky.social, @ukbiobank.bsky.social, @natera.bsky.social, Ambry Genetics, and the All of Us Research Program to assemble a cohort of over 1 million patients, finding nearly 1 in 1,000 have a pathogenic NF1 variant.

A genotype-first approach identifies high incidence of NF1 pathogenic variants with distinct disease associations - Nature Communications Our current understanding of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is based on patients ascertained through phenotype-first approaches, which estimate a low prevalence at 1 in 3,000. Here, the authors levera...

Patience, collaboration, and perseverance pay off! Our investigation of the population prevalence of NF1 pathogenic variants is out today in @naturecomms.bsky.social! We find these variants are much more common than anticipated and confer increased risk for cancer.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/o...

It was heartening to see so many people standing up for #science today at #Philadelphia City Hall. At a time when it’s easy to feel powerless against a wannabe-fascist government, this was such an excellent reminder of where the real power lies — in the hands of the people. #standupfightback

2025 is here! I am so excited for Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins to be in readers' hands in just a few weeks. We have work to do, and I truly hope this book will help us move forward together. 🧬✊🏾🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Very cool! Yeah I don’t think it will be possible to completely account for the potentially disruptive effects of duplications without something like long read to fully characterize them, and that’s sadly not gonna be easy to come by at scale, yet

Next-Generation Sequencing of Duplication CNVs Reveals that Most Are Tandem and Some Create Fusion Genes at Breakpoints Interpreting the genomic and phenotypic consequences of copy-number variation (CNV) is essential to understanding the etiology of genetic disorders. Whereas deletion CNVs lead obviously to haploinsuff...

This is super cool stuff, Jonathan! Two questions that might be ignorant of details of your methods. 1. How did you consider dups that affect multiple genes? 2. There is evidence that duplications can result in gene disruption and LOF, can this be accounted for?: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Me: Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like.
ChatGPT: I got this.