CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - New unusual consortium of companies has signed a 5-year, $ 40 million agree with Eric Lander, a gene mapper at the Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop new techniques in "functional genomics". The parties hope to find a commercial advantage - in the form of new ways to diagnose, prevent and combat the disease -. In the growing number of molecular information on the genes of people
Under the agreement, the New Jersey-based pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb giant and two smaller biotech companies - "smart DNA "manufacturer Affymetrix Inc. of Santa Clara, California, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts - give the Whitehead / MIT Center for Genome research equal amounts of cash and equipment for research in faster, more ways effective to collect and compare genetic data. In return, companies will receive commercial rights to the technologies developed under the program. The most coveted by companies are automated systems to analyze the activities of tens of thousands of genes and proteins in normal and diseased cells. detailed legal provisions and the nature of the inventions themselves, which govern companies get common or exclusive rights.
The agreement will significantly boost the budget of the current research annual $ 14 million center Whitehead / MIT, a hub of effort funded by the massive government to locate and characterize the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 genes in the human genome. That money, most federal grants through the Human Genome Project, has paid for the first rough guides to the 3 billion nucleotides in the human DNA: studded cards with thousands of landmarks called "sequence sites labeled "( Science , 25 October 1996, p. 540). Lander says he is now eager to see this information put to work in the biomedical field." We have 7 years to date in the construction of maps and sequences, telling us that this structural genomic information would help to change the world. it's time to take it for a test drive, "he said.
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