Genetic and genomic medicine explores how our DNA shapes health, disease risk, and responses to treatment. This rapidly evolving field moves beyond simple family trees to examine the complex molecular instructions that guide every cell in the human body. By decoding these biological blueprints, researchers aim to unlock personalized therapies that target the root causes of illness rather than just treating symptoms.

On Gist.Science, we bring the latest discoveries directly from medRxiv, the leading preprint server for health sciences. We process every new submission in this category as it arrives, transforming dense academic findings into both detailed technical breakdowns and clear, plain-language summaries. This ensures that groundbreaking research is accessible to clinicians, scientists, and curious readers alike without the usual barriers of jargon.

Below are the most recent papers in genetic and genomic medicine, organized for your review.

📄 genetic and genomic medicine

GLP1R Variants and Polygenic Risk Underlie Heterogeneous Response to GLP-1 Receptor Agonists in Type 2 Diabetes

This study demonstrates that heterogeneous glycemic responses to GLP-1 receptor agonists in adults with type 2 diabetes are significantly driven by a combination of baseline clinical characteristics and genetic factors, specifically higher polygenic risk scores and the presence of common GLP1R variants, which are more prevalent in poor responders.

Tirumalasetty, M. B., Chun Wang, V. H., Mohiuddin, M. S., Choubey, M., Barua, R., Zhang, D. S., Miao, Q.2026-08-02
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

SVkhor: a unified framework for structural variant integration across long-read, short-read, and optical genome mapping data

SVkhor is a unified software framework that integrates structural variant callsets from short-read, long-read, and optical genome mapping data by normalizing and merging outputs across different callers and technologies to produce compact, interpretable catalogs for benchmarking and clinical analysis.

Sharif Rahmani, E., Thomas, Q., Tisserant, E., Vautrot, V., Auclair, A., Hounnondaho, F.-Z., Castillon, E., Faivre, L. (…)2026-08-02
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

ArchSpiral: An iPad-Based Digital Archimedean Spiral Assessment for Objective Motor Evaluation in Rare Diseases

The study presents ArchSpiral, an iPad application that successfully digitizes the ICARS spiral tracing task for rare disease assessment, demonstrating high agreement with traditional paper-based scoring while generating objective quantitative biomarkers like steadiness to support longitudinal clinical research.

Schecter, D. R., Tinker, R. J., Danieletto, M., MacDonald, G., Kozicz, T., Morava, E., Glicksberg, B. S.2026-07-30
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

ASXL3 truncating patient variants mediate transcriptional gain-of-function and are antisense oligonucleotide-responsive

This study reveals that truncating variants in ASXL3, previously assumed to be loss-of-function, actually cause Bainbridge-Ropers syndrome through a gain-of-function mechanism involving aberrant protein accumulation, and demonstrates that antisense oligonucleotides can effectively rescue the resulting transcriptional dysregulation.

Nakamura, Y., Nguyen, T., Mor, N., Dominissini, D., Tang, I., Torio, C. J., Thulaseedharan, H., Zhou, R. Y., Zhang, W. (…)2026-07-22
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

Atlas of glomerular disease-specific genetic effects on blood transcriptome

This study presents a comprehensive atlas of disease-context-specific genetic effects on the blood transcriptome for five major glomerular diseases, generated by integrating whole-genome and bulk blood transcriptome sequencing from 1,822 CureGN participants to identify thousands of novel expression, splicing, and editing QTLs, many of which are unique to specific conditions or modified by clinical factors, thereby providing a powerful new resource for integrative gene discovery in primary glomerulonephropathies.

Liu, L., Wang, C., Kravets, O., Fermin, D., Eichinger, F., Zanoni, F., Khan, A., Zhang, J. Y., Ouyang, Y., Li, Q., Hamil (…)2026-07-20
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

Critically Ill Children Frequently Receive Medications with Established but Unused Pharmacogenomic Guidelines: Actionable Findings from an Integrated Electronic Medical Record and Exome Sequencing Study

This retrospective study of nearly 5,000 critically ill children reveals that over one-third receive medications with established pharmacogenomic guidelines, suggesting a significant opportunity to improve personalized care through exome sequencing, which successfully identified actionable metabolizer phenotypes in 62% of sequenced patients.

Lynch, N., Elefant, N., Revah-Politi, A., Geneslaw, A. S., Beckett, J., Wall, J. B., Aguilar Breton, C., Sabatello, M. (…)2026-07-20
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

Identifying and Characterising Common Genetic Differences in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

By applying Case-Case GWAS to over 100,000 cases, this study identified 19 genome-wide significant loci with divergent genetic effects that differentiate schizophrenia from bipolar disorder, revealing distinct neurodevelopmental pathways and biological mechanisms despite their substantial shared genetic liability.

Willcocks, I. R., Richards, A., Legge, S. E., Holmans, P., Di Florio, A., Cardno, A. G., O'donovan, M. C., Owen, M. J. (…)2026-07-19
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

Single-cell gene programs define subtype identity and metastatic trajectories in renal cell carcinoma

This study leverages a comprehensive single-cell atlas of over 85,000 renal cell carcinoma profiles to refine subtype classification, deconstruct canonical pathways into 59 functional gene programs, and identify specific transcriptional signatures of metastatic progression and poor clinical outcomes.

Madrigal, A., Kim, M., Mehrjoo, Z., Nishimura, T., Saatci, O., Osakwe, A., Zavacky, E., Moslemi, E., Glennon, K. I., Dan (…)2026-07-16
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

European-derived coronary artery disease polygenic scores over-flag genetic risk in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian populations: a multi-score analysis in 1000 Genomes

This study demonstrates that European-derived coronary artery disease polygenic scores are inconsistently calibrated and systematically over-flag high genetic risk in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian populations when European thresholds are applied, highlighting the critical need for local validation and recalibration before clinical use.

Hoang, Q. P., Le, T. X., Doan, D. D.2026-07-15
📄 genetic and genomic medicine

Clinical validation of large-scale functional assays: insights from 2,120 gene-truthset-assay evaluations

This study demonstrates that the clinical evidence points allocatable for functional assay validation vary significantly based on the composition and stringency of the 'truthset' used, highlighting that augmenting ClinVar-based sets with systematically generated 'proxy-clinical' benign missense variants can substantially improve evidence strength and underscoring the urgent need for standardized guidance to ensure consistency in clinical variant classification.

Allen, S., Rowlands, C. F., Kuzbari, Z., Garrett, A., Durkie, M., Burghel, G. J., Robinson, R., Callaway, A., Field, J. (…)2026-07-14