PRINCETON, N.J., and CHICAGO, June 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Orchid BioSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: ORCH - news) and The SNP Consortium Ltd. today announced the successful completion of a major milestone in their collaboration under which Orchid is confirming and determining the frequency of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in diverse populations. As part of the milestone, Orchid has delivered to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory the largest public set of SNP frequency data generated from The SNP Consortium database to date.
``We are very pleased to place these SNP frequency data into the public domain,'' said Arthur Holden, chairman and chief executive officer of The SNP Consortium. ``Our primary mission is founded on the principle of public access -- we want to make SNP data widely available to all biomedical researchers. The SNP analyses Orchid has delivered to the Consortium provide an initial foundation that will help progress our ultimate goal of constructing a publicly available, genome-wide SNP map.''
SNPs represent the most common form of genetic variability, and each individual carries several million SNP sites in their genome. Knowledge about the frequency of occurrence of SNPs is being used to construct SNP maps that are expected to help medical researchers pinpoint the genetic differences that contribute to individual variability in susceptibility to disease and in response to therapy. In turn, this knowledge is expected to enhance understanding of disease processes and facilitate discovery, development and delivery of safer and more effective medications.
``To achieve this milestone, we screened successfully 30,000 of the Consortium's SNPs, of which the first tranche of 10,000 has now been released into the public domain,'' said Michael Boyce-Jacino, Ph.D., chief technology officer and vice president of research and development at Orchid. ``We are delighted with the excellent progress of our work for The SNP Consortium, which is providing important data to the biomedical research community at large while giving Orchid unprecedented opportunity to develop a host of content-rich SNP products that we plan to make available to our customers later this year.''
As part of the collaboration, Orchid is evaluating 60,000 SNPs selected from The SNP Consortium database. Each SNP is being genotyped on DNA samples from 42 individuals from each of the three populations under study. These DNA samples have been assembled by the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. The SNPs have been selected to represent a sampling from all chromosomes across the genome and include SNPs associated with genes involved with drug metabolism and those that are known to be potential targets for drug development.
In addition, Orchid is conducting its own study to analyze a selection of the Consortium's SNPs using the Coriell Institute's CEPH DNA samples. The CEPH pedigrees are multi-generational families that have been used extensively for genome mapping studies using standard microsatellite technology. By superimposing SNP information onto the existing microsatellite maps for these pedigrees, Orchid intends to accelerate the development of genome-wide SNP maps that will make possible linkage disequilibrium and haplotype studies.
Using Orchid's proprietary SNP-IT(TM) technology, individual SNP genotypes in these studies are being determined for every individual sample in the populations. For 60,000 SNPs, this equates to more than 7.2 million genotypes that Orchid expects to analyze by the end of the collaboration. Orchid is conducting the SNP genotyping on multiple high throughput platforms in its MegaSNPatron(TM) facilities in Princeton, NJ and Dayton, OH. Orchid's highly automated SNPstream® 25K system was used to analyze this initial set of data. For a substantial portion of the project, Orchid is also using its SNPcode(TM) platform, which combines Orchid's SNP-IT technology with multiplex PCR and Affymetrix GenFlex(TM) chips to analyze 1,000 SNPs on a single sample at one time... |
