Tuesday, December 17, 2002

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Forbes Genomics Revolution Actually Happens

"Investors may have stopped watching, but drug companies are finally beginning to wrench tangible benefits from the human genome. Two years after a boom fed by hype, a revolution finally is starting to take hold not in how drugs are invented, but in how they are tested.

Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ), the world's third-largest drug company, is using gene expression arrays, also known as DNA chips, to keep clinical duds from reaching expensive animal or human trials. Separately, Millennium Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: MLNM - news - people ) used similar chips in its late-stage clinical studies of its cancer drug, Velcade. Millennium's work is a big step toward so-called personalized medicine, in which treatment would be tailored toward individual patients based on genetic makeup."

redux [10.07.02]
SFGate Proofreading the human genome

"Perlegen has spent upwards of $50 million on the chemistry, instruments, computers and brain power needed to pull off this hellish job of proofreading.

Yet there was only a muted celebration a few weeks ago, when Perlegen's scientists decided they'd found the last of the 1,717,015 SNPs that biotech firms have been seeking since the human genome was sequenced in 2000.

The Scientist In Style, but... Out of Reach
[requires 'free' registration]

"Pharmacogenomics holds the promise of delivering safer, better designer drugs--and profits--to pharmaceutical manufacturers. But the technology also poses a challenge to the industry's current, highly successful business model that relies on one-size-fits-all blockbuster drugs.

For small biotech companies and large drug manufacturers alike, pharmacogenomics remains only one component of genome-based research and consumes only a small part of the $30 billion (US) in annual pharmaceutical research and development funding, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). "It's an area where we are seeing movement, but it's not there yet," says Gillian Woollett, associate vice president for biologics and biotechnology at PhRMA."

redux [09.10.02]
Bio-IT World The New, New Pharmacogenomics

"Collins is unimpressed by the hubbub that has shaken the industry lately. "In some quarters there was a misunderstanding, or naivete, about how having the sequence was going to solve everything. And there were some business models built solely upon the notion of quick profits, particularly selling subscription databases."

He dismisses talk about a foundering industry. "I think that every pharmaceutical company is still expecting that genomics will be the platform upon which they will build the next generation of drugs," says Collins. Others echo Collins' perspective. "We will change the treatment of cancer," says Variagenics' Adams. And there is no hint of doubt in his voice."

redux [08.08.01]
Stanford Medical Informatics Preprint Archive Challenges for Biomedical Informatics and Pharmacogenomics

"Pharmacogenomics requires the integration and analysis of genomic, molecular, cellular, and clinical data, and thus offers a remarkable set of challenges to biomedical informatics. These include infrastructural challenges such as the creation of data models and data bases for storing this data, the integration of these data with external databases, the extraction of information from natural language text, and the protection of databases with sensitive information. There are also scientific challenge in creating tools to support gene expression analysis, three-dimensional structural analysis, and comparative genomic analysis. In this review, we summarize the current uses of informatics within pharmacogenomics, and show how the technical challenges that remain for biomedical informatics are typical of those that will be confronted in the post-genomic era."