Celera Aims to Develop Targeted Cancer Vaccines
Thursday July 20 5:44 PM ET
By Kate Fodor
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Celera Genomics, the company that helped change the future of medicine when it completed the human genome sequence earlier this summer, now says that it intends to have a hand in that future itself.
Celera will use the data it has generated as a starting point for the development of highly specific cancer vaccines, the company's president and chief scientific officer, Dr. J. Craig Venter, told journalists on Thursday at a briefing co-sponsored by the Gene Media Forum and Science Writers in New York.
The firm hopes to create vaccines targeted at various types of cancer--and, eventually, vaccines designed specifically for individual patients.
``The future as I see it for medicine is that it's going to be much more individual,'' Venter said, adding that ``most drugs only work on 30% to 50% of the population.'' By knowing more about patients' genetic makeup and about the nature of particular cancers, Celera should be able to develop screening methods and vaccines that work much more predictably, he said. However, he stressed, ``we're in the very early phases of discovery.''
The cancer vaccine project is one facet of the company's larger effort in the area of proteomics, or the analysis of proteins in healthy and diseased tissues. Sequencing the human genome ``was only the starting point,'' Venter said. One of the many steps that need to be taken to translate the genetic information into practical advances will be learning more about the proteins the genes produce.
Cancer is a logical starting point for Celera because it is ''one of the diseases that really is affected by knowing the interactions between the proteins,'' Venter said.
And Celera plans to revolutionize the sequencing of proteins in much the same way that it revolutionized gene sequencing, he asserted. The firm's parent company, Applied Biosystems, which provided the massive sequencing machines that helped complete the human genome ahead of schedule, has developed similarly powerful machines for sequencing proteins, Venter said. A prototype version should be in use by the end of the summer.
Using a number of the machines, Celera's proteomics facility will be able to measure a million protein sequences a day--a number that is ``orders of magnitude beyond what other people are thinking of,'' Venter claimed.
The firm will sequence blood samples from people with various cancers, with an initial focus on breast and colon cancer, looking for indicators of disease, known as surrogate markers. ``We don't have good surrogate markers for colon cancer or breast cancer,'' Venter pointed out. Finding them could lead to tests that would detect cancers so early that they would nearly always be treatable, he suggested.
Celera will also work on ``making antibodies to a lot of the proteins'' as the earliest step in developing vaccines that could later be moved into human trials. Working off of a base of genomic and proteomic information will help the company select compounds that are highly likely to be successful in humans, avoiding the ``biological roulette'' that is the current reality of drug development, Venter said.
Celera's move into development of marketable products represents a turn-around for the company, which originally insisted that it would remain focused purely on bioinformatics. As reported by Reuters Health, Venter suggested late last month that Celera planned a shift toward more functional--and patentable--discoveries, but the company has not previously made clear that it would work to internally develop end-stage products.
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