In a previous post,
I discussed a number of large sequencing projects, including by the governments of
Saudi Arabia
and the United Kingdom, which are sequencing the genomes of 100,000 of their citizens each.
I also lamented that
these projects are exclusively government-funded, and that big pharma and
biotechnology companies don't appear to consider large-scale sequencing a viable approach to
drug discovery. Well, actually some of them do.
Three recent
developments stand out:
Regeneron, a large
biopharmarmaceutical company, has teamed up with Geisinger Health Systems, a local
American healthcare network, to sequence 100,000 exomes at an estimated cost of $100 million. Geisinger has detailed electronic health
records of its patients, which will help with the interpretation of the data.
Amgen, another large
biopharma company, announced that it would partner
with the Broad Institute,
one of the world's biggest genomics research institutes, to discover new drug targets.
Prior to that, Amgen had acquired DeCode Genetics, which despite producing
first-class science had been struggling.
And finally, the
pharmaceutical giant GSK,
together with two European genomics research centres, the EBI and the Sanger Institute (where I'm based), launched the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV),
which will validate drug targets using a genomic approach.
Overall, it seems
that pharmaceutical and biotech companies indeed have an increasing appetite
for applying genomics to drug discovery. The question remains how successful
this approach will be, and how much of an advantage it confers to the companies that invest in it.