Genaissance Publishes Research
Outlining Variations in 313 Genes
By GEETA ANAND
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In an in-depth analysis of the differences between people's genes, Genaissance Pharmaceuticals Inc. Friday publishes an article in the journal Science outlining all of the genetic variations in 313 human genes. The research furthers the effort to develop personalized medicine, which seeks to tailor treatments to individuals' genetic profiles.
The small New Haven, Conn., biotechnology company also said that it plans to find the patterns of variations, or haplotypes, of all 30,000 or so human genes. In its paper, Genaissance researchers say they found an average of 14 different haplotypes of each gene in human beings. And they said that in many cases, no single haplotype is present in the majority of people, an important fact for scientists to consider when developing drugs that interact with a particular gene.
The announcement sets the company up for a race with the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, which recently initiated an effort to map all of the haplotypes in the human genome.
"This looks like the start of another public-private race to me," said Ashok R. Amin, an assistant professor of pathology and medicine who is working on several projects to correlate patients' responses to drugs at the Hospital for Joint Diseases at the New York University School of Medicine. He was referring to the much-publicized race between the NIH and Celera Genomics Group to sequence all of the genes in human beings, which ended in a tie in February.
Genaissance and the head of the Genome Research institute, Francis Collins, discounted such predictions of that sort of fierce competition.
Now that the human genome has been sequenced, scientists have turned their attention to understanding the differences between people's genes. The goal of that research is to understand why some people get certain diseases or have particular responses to drugs. The chief executive of Genaissance, Gualberto Ruano, said his study will bring the understanding of the human genome to a new level. "The Human Genome project offers a one-dimensional image akin to a medieval view of the genome," he said. "Ours brings perspective." |
