Journal article

Automated reanalysis of genomic data for rare disease diagnostics at scale

MJ Welland, KD Ahlquist, P De Fazio, C Austin-Tse, L Pais, L Wedd, S Bryen, R Rius, M Franklin, C Morrison, G Hall, L Gauthier, A Bloemendal, DI Francis, AJ Mallett, A Mallawaarachchi, PJ Lockhart, R Leventer, IE Scheffer, KB Howell Show all

Nature Medicine | Published : 2026

Open access

Abstract

Reanalysis of genomic data in rare disease is highly effective in increasing diagnostic yields but remains limited by manual approaches. Automation and optimization for high specificity will be necessary to ensure scalability, adoption and sustainability of iterative reanalysis. We developed Talos, an open-source tool that automates variant prioritization by integrating dynamically updated gene−disease and variant-level evidence with inheritance-aware filtering and validated its performance using data from 1,089 individuals with rare disease. Trio-based analysis identified 90% of known diagnoses, returning 1.3 variants per case on average. Variant burden reduced to one variant per 200 cases ..

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Grants

Awarded by Department of Health | National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)


Awarded by U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)