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Health

Precision medicine

NIST is playing a pivotal role in helping to define the measurements and standards needed to ensure the promise of precision medicine, which is an emerging approach for disease prevention and treatment that takes into account an individual’s genes, environment and lifestyle.

NIST and the Promise of Precision Medicine
NIST and the Promise of Precision Medicine

News and Updates

Blog Posts

Thomas Forbes wears safety glasses as he looks at the screen attached to a piece of equipment in the lab.

Your Future Medications Could Be Personalized for You on a 3D Printer

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Justin Zook in a lab surrounded by genetic sequencing machines

Our Human Genes Are Diverse. Our Team Is Helping Create a DNA Reference Library to Reflect That.

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a small box with cable pairs of cable outlets coming out of either end. the box top is open and there is circuitry and a white nipple shaped piece in the center.

Working to Improve Small-Scale MRIs: My Summer as a SURF Student at NIST

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Events

Conceptual illustration of cells, a flow cytometry stream, automation and collaboration with logos for NIST and NIAID underneath.

AI and Flow Cytometry Workshop

Mon, Jun 9 - Tue, Jun 10 2025
A NIST–FDA–NIAID Co-Organized Workshop This workshop aims to advance AI/ML applications in flow cytometry and related
Genome editing technologies

Genome Editing Consortium Workshop

Thu, Jun 12 - Fri, Jun 13 2025
The purpose of this workshop is to share and obtain feedback on current and future activities of the NIST Genome Editing

Projects and Programs

Genome editing technologies

NIST Genome Editing Consortium

Ongoing
Targeted genome editing , a method used to alter the DNA of living cells at desired locations, is poised to revolutionize science and medicine. To fight diseases, novel genome edited therapeutics, including those for use in regenerative medicine and infectious diseases, are being developed. Many

NIST Genome Editing Program

Ongoing
For genome editing systems to reach their full potential in research and commercial products, new measurement tools, capabilities, and standards must be developed to efficiently implement and assess the performance of these editing technologies, as well as to evaluate the utility of resulting
GIAB Logo

Genome in a Bottle

Ongoing
Consortium goals: The Genome in a Bottle Consortium is a public-private-academic consortium hosted by NIST to develop the technical infrastructure (reference standards, reference methods, and reference data) to enable translation of whole human genome sequencing to clinical practice and innovations

Publications

A bilateral comparison of 227Th activity standards between NPL and NIST

Author(s)
Andrew Fenwick, Denis Bergeron, Brittany Broder, Emma Bendall, Jeffrey Cessna, Sean Collins, Leticia Pibida, Natasha Ramirez, Elisa Napoli
The National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (United States) each determined the massic activity and

Small variant benchmark from a complete assembly of X and Y chromosomes

Author(s)
Justin Wagner, Nathanael Olson, Jennifer McDaniel, Lindsay Harris, Chunlin Xiao, Fritz Sedlazeck, Kishwar Shafin, Andrew Carroll, Justin Zook
The sex chromosomes contain complex, important genes impacting medical phenotypes, but differ from the autosomes in their ploidy and large repetitive regions

Variable Gain DNA Nanostructure Charge Amplifiers for Biosensing

Author(s)
Jacob Majikes, Seulki Cho, Thomas Cleveland, James Liddle, Arvind Balijepalli
Electronic measurements of engineered nanostructures comprised solely of DNA (DNA nanostructures) enable new signal conditioning modalities in biosensing. Here