Tuesday, November 07, 2000

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WashTech.Com Celera to Join Effort On Diagnostic Tests
"Celera Genomics Corp., the Rockville company that is creating and selling huge genetic databases, will take part in a new venture designed to develop gene-based tests for diagnosing illness and guiding treatment."

The venture was announced yesterday by PE Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., parent company of Celera.

"Celera's role will be to discover genetic factors that can be used for rapid diagnosis or to guide treatment choices. For example, such tests might be used to predict, based on genetics, which available drug is likely to give the best result in a particular patient.

Once discovered by Celera, the genetic markers would be commercialized as tests by the new venture, which will be headquartered on a new corporate campus in Pleasanton, Calif."

GenomeWeb PE Announces Major Molecular Diagnostics Initiative
"PE plans to begin spending an estimated $20 to $30 million a year on a new molecular diagnostics initiative, and has hired Roche Molecular Systems CEO Kathy Ordonez and two other Roche senior executives to head up the operation, the company announced Monday afternoon."

"The initiative will focus on development of molecular-based DNA assays for infectious diseases, genetic diseases, cancer and general drug response, said PE chairman Tony White in a conference call with industry analysts."

""The market today for these types of products is about one and a half billion dollars today,” White said. “The expectation pretty much across the range of studies is that it would grow at a compound rate of 25 percent or better over the next ten years. This translates into a 10 to 12 billion dollar market.”

“We’re convinced that this is the future of medicine, the future of more personalized medicine,” added Celera CEO Craig Venter during the call."

redux [04.11.00]
The British Medical Journal Science, medicine, and the future: Pharmacogenetics
"Pharmacogenetic testing may provide the first example of a mechanism whereby DNA based testing can be applied to populations, but we are still a long way from having a pharmacogenetic DNA chip that general practitioners can use to identify all the drugs to which any particular patient is sensitive. However, there is increasing evidence that pharmacogenetics will be extremely important in the health service. One day it may be considered unethical not to carry out such tests routinely to avoid exposing individuals to doses of drugs that could be harmful to them. The ability to identify sensitive individuals, either before drug treatment or after an adverse drug response would also be of economic importance as it would avoid the empiricism associated with matching the most appropriate drug at its optimal dose for each patient. It might also substantially reduce the need for hospitalisation, and its associated costs, because of adverse drug reactions.

Our increasing knowledge of the mechanisms of drug action, the identification of new drug targets and the understanding of genetic factors that determine our response to drugs may allow us to design drugs that are specifically targeted towards particular populations or that avoid genetic variability in therapeutic response. The extent of genetic polymorphism in the human population indicates that pharmacogenetic variability will probably be an issue for most new drugs.

The development of pharmacogenetics provides at least one mechanism for taking prescription away from its current empiricism and progressing towards more "individualised" drug treatment. In view of the momentum that pharmacogenetics is developing, it is essential that the subject is taught as part of the medical student curriculum."

redux [10.23.00]
The Dallas Morning News Right down to the letter
""If we understood the diseases better, we'd be in a better position to target therapies," said David Altshuler, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Traditionally, scientists have looked for disease-causing genes by studying large families afflicted with a certain condition. But given enough SNPs, researchers hope they won't have to rely on finding just the right family to study.Theoretically, researchers could simply compare the SNPs of unrelated people with high blood pressure, for instance, to those of people without the condition.

But researchers don't have proof yet that the new approach will work, said Eric Boerwinkle, a geneticist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

"I think there's some skepticism," he said. "I don't know of an example where that's been carried out.""

redux [02.18.00]
Science SNP Mappers Confront Reality and Find It Daunting
[summary - can be viewed for free once registered]
"The genetic markers called SNPs have been widely touted as the key to personalized medicine, with drugs tailored to an individual's genotype and simple tests to determine one's risk of specific diseases. But a closed meeting held last week, sponsored by the SNP Consortium and the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, concluded that those promises may be harder to achieve than expected, and that more SNPs may be required to track down a particular disease gene than previously estimated.”