The United Kingdom is punching above its weight in genomics.
Compared to the
other two European countries I've covered on this blog - France
and Germany
- the UK is the clear genomics leader in genomics. The reason is not so much
that the rest of Europe has neglected genomics, but that the UK has gone all
in.
The Sanger Institute, where I
work, is a good example of this. It made the single largest
contribution to the Human Genome Project, and it is still going strong.
Together with the Broad Institute,
it is today the leading genomics institute worldwide in terms of high-impact
citations, and amongst the largest sequencing centres in the world. It is
largely funded not by the British government, but by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable
foundation.
Sequencing
technology is another example. Both the most prominent sequencing technology
used today and the technology that many see as most promising for the future
were developed in the UK. Sequencing by synthesis, which produces most sequencing data nowadays, was developed at the
University of Cambridge before being spun out into a company called Solexa,
which was acquired by Illumina in 2007.
The company that is most likely to first bring nanopore sequencing
to the market, Oxford Nanopore,
is also located in the UK.
The British
government is keen to keep and expand the UK's capabilities in genomics. Last
December, it announced plans
to sequence up to 100,000 patients in the NHS, the UK's publicly funded
healthcare system. It has not announced many details, except that it has
earmarked £100 million for this project. This money will not only cover the
sequencing, but also training and the development of bioinformatics capacity. This
is about all the information that has been made public about this project, but
a more detailed plan is expected by June this year.
Especially compared
to similarly sized countries such as France, Germany, or Japan, the UK has a
strong base in genomics, and there seems to be enough public commitment to
ensure that this is not going to change over the next few years.