Page 148 - Genomic Medicine in Emerging Economies

Automatation 137

best known were Campo de Mayo, Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, Vesu-
vio, Garage Olimpo, Pozo de Banfield, and La Perla. Many women were preg-
nant or had children when they were abducted. Children born in captivity in
clandestine maternities or kidnapped with their parents were mostly held as
spoils of war, given to families generally related to the armed forces, and their
identities were forged as they were registered as their appropriators’ children.
Others were murdered, sold, or abandoned in emergency shelters for minors.
Family organizations, such as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, began the search
of nearly 500 children stolen, and, when democracy returned in 1983, these orga-
nizations became the engine to develop the first statistical calculations in forensic
genetics in our country. In 1987 the first genetic data bank was created, being the
foundation stone of DNA banks of criminology and people search that emerged
in 1995 (http://en.mincyt.gob.ar/ministerio/national-dna-data-bank-bndg-23
and http://www.mincyt.gob.ar/adjuntos/archivos/000/021/0000021615.pdf and
http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/verNorma.do?id=160772).
It was also a kickoff for the creation of the first laboratories that specialized in
forensic genetics in Argentina, which emerged in the early 1990s.
Finding that there was a great unmet need for paternity testing, our company
incorporated an area of forensic genetics to solve cases of civil as well as crimi-
nal causes. Again we faced the lack of commercial kits, hence the genetic mark-
ers selection used in parenting studies and our own kit development were
based on the scientific literature. We validated studies by means of popula-
tion surveys, and then communicated in different forensic genetics congresses.
There was not any software for statistical calculus, hence all the computations
were manually done. “With mathematical formulas written on paper and cal-
culator in hand we calculated Paternity Probabilities…”

AUTOMATATION

At the end of the 1990s, infectious diseases became the largest field of molecu-
lar diagnostics, particularly in viral diseases such as HIV, hepatitis C and B,
cytomegalovirus, HPV, and tuberculosis. As a result, large global companies
such as Roche Diagnostics (http://www.roche.com.ar/) and Abbott (http://
www.abbottlab.com.ar/) settled in Argentina and placed automated equip-
ment for molecular infectious diseases in specialized clinical laboratories.
Therefore, specific laboratories performed genetic test for infectious diseases
(quantitative and qualitative studies for viruses, viral genotyping studies, etc.),
and other laboratories, such as ours, decided to abandon infectious diseases
and instead dedicated themselves exclusively to inherited diseases.

In 2001, we rethought our molecular genetic diagnostic laboratory project and
founded a new company, Genda S.A. (http://www.genda.com.ar/), which spe-
cialized in the diagnosis of genetic diseases and paternity testing, extending