In a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, scientists have created a new way to read human DNA that costs 75% less than before — and it's already helping researchers uncover new clues about mental illness, cancer, and other diseases. The method is called BGE, short for Blended Genome Exome, and since late 2022, the team at the Broad Institute has used it to sequence more than 400,000 human DNA samples from research studies around the world. In 2025 alone, they processed nearly 123,000 samples using the technique. "We've shown that the BGE technology works and it works at scale, and now the entire field can benefit from the method," said Alicia Martin, one of the researchers who led the work. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Genetics. Understanding the DNA code is a bit like having a very long instruction manual written in a four-letter alphabet. Reading that entire manual — all 3 billion letters — for thousands of people used to be extremely expensive and time-consuming. That made it hard for scientists to run the large studies they need to spot patterns linking genes to disease. BGE solves this by combining two different scans of the genome in one machine run. One scan reads the parts that contain instructions for building proteins, where rare but powerful mutations often hide. The other scan reads the whole genome more lightly, catching common genetic variations that influence health and disease risk. Together, they give a complete picture at a much lower price. The researchers tested BGE on more than 53,000 samples from people of African, African American, and Latin American backgrounds — groups that are often underrepresented in genetics research. They found that BGE picked up far more genetic variations than older methods that only check specific spots in the DNA. The technique can also detect large structural changes in the genome, like extra or missing chunks of DNA, which are known to play a role in psychiatric conditions. One goal of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, where much of this work took place, is to find the genetic roots of severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia. But doing that requires studying huge numbers of people. "To reach the scale that we need, with a fixed budget, we need to ideally capture as much of the genome as we can, but at the lowest cost possible," Martin explained. The researchers hope that by studying more diverse populations, they can develop better predictions of disease risk and discover new biological pathways involved in illness. A clinical version of BGE is already being used to offer low-cost genetic testing for patients, including those at risk of prostate cancer. As costs continue to drop, the hope is that more people around the world will benefit from the genomic revolution.