Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca joins several heavyweights in the genetic sequencing to mine up to 2 million people genomes for new drug targets. The London-based company, today launched a genomic internal center that exchange data and samples with Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) -geneticist ambitious Genomics J. Craig Venter startup and integrate a research team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. The Company expects the entire genomes, combined with data on individual health, reveal rare genetic variants that influence the disease and suggests new drug targets.
Given that only about 100,000 people worldwide had their whole genomes sequenced to date, the new resource would be unprecedented, says geneticist Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, which is not involved in the partnership. Other pharmaceutical companies have made large investments in genomic data. 2012 Amgen repurchase of 140,000 volunteer base data deCODE Genetics was "somewhat of a precursor to this," Topol said, but it was limited to Icelandic population and did not include whole genomes for each participant. "This is about finally getting some power for us the big data, the level of the entire genome," he said.
Many in the hope of such power will revive a field field that promised more than a decade to find drugs based on disease-causing mutations. "I think we need to be clear and admit that the fulfillment of these promises has taken much longer than many people expected," said David Goldstein , a human geneticist at Columbia University and scientific consultant to AstraZeneca, in a press conference today. "I really personally believe that we finally ... a turning point."
Under the arrangement, HLI will sequence an anticipated 500,000 samples of participants in clinical trials from AstraZeneca, and share his own collection million expected genome. (Venter said the company already has 26,000 complete genomes with corresponding clinical data, and adds approximately every 15 minutes.) Without large databases of whole genomes or exomes, the portion encoding the protein genome, looking for drug targets has so far found that common variants with little effect on the disease, and genetic research has "used his tools," he said. "It is the rare variants in each of us who determine our traits."
The partnership also includes the University Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland Helsinki, which will provide for the analysis of thousands of genomes and samples sequenced from its biobank, accompanied by songs compiled in the country's health care system. AstraZeneca researchers can choose a gene of interest and research of the Finnish population for variants associated with diseases, or to identify specific safety concerns in the treatment of patients with a given mutation.
Meanwhile, AstraZeneca plans to convene a scientific team based at the Sanger Institute and led by one of its employees, to identify drug targets from its data. As Sanger Institute director Mike Stratton explained at the press conference today, the new team will "walk the halls of AstraZeneca" and " open the doors between the two intellectual worlds. "
This cozy arrangement might prove complicated for the institute, said Eric Campbell, a sociologist who studies the relationship between universities and industry at Harvard University. "Relations industry have helpful benefits ... but the risks are great for an institution," he said. He wondered whether the presence of the AstraZeneca will move research to drug discovery projects of mind of the Sanger Institute, for example, and if researchers will be free to publish results that show damage or risks potential of AstraZeneca products.
AstraZeneca did not disclose financial details of the agreement, but Venter revealed in a closing comment that the arrangement had taken a year of negotiations: "You make babies faster than you. can do a collaboration of the genome "
0 Komentar