Analysis of state laws on informed consent for clinical genetic testing in the era of genomic sequencing

This article assesses the adequacy of informed consent to clinical genetic testing laws based on an examination of 15 states with institutions that had been involved in a National Institutes of Health-supported Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium project. We identified relevant statutory provisions through a legal search engine and included statutes that describe the informed consent requirements for clinical genetic testing and/or the protections for genetic material, information, or data. We found that statutory definitions were often limited in problematic ways, such as focusing only on variants known to be associated with disease or negative health effects or associated with asymptomatic disease. Some statutes required complex levels of detail if applied to genomic technologies and set confusing disclosure standards for current use and future access. Others had exceptions from informed consent requirements for future research use, limited requirements for the destruction of specimens as opposed to derived data, or linked key definitional components to the evolving concept of "identifiability." Further reform and research are needed to ensure that state law protections advance as rapidly as the science they aspire to enable.