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Biotech / Medical : Incyte (INCY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Biotech Jim who wrote (986)	4/18/1999 12:18:00 AM
From: Rocketman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3202

INCY has sequenced the 3' and 5' ends of over 110,000 unique human genes as of January this year. When they claim 3.2M ESTs, that is unique ESTs, not repeats of the same thing. However, keep in mind that there is overlap between ESTs (contigs) which is necessary for assembling them into longer pieces and full genes. INCY uses the ESTs to locate the full genes which can then be sequenced entirely and assembled into a full length piece in a clone. As of January they have sequenced over 10,000 full length genes (and you can bet filed patents on them all). The frequently expressed genes are all done by INCY by now. It is the infrequently expressed ones which are harder to find by their methods (aka genome closure), but they are getting better and faster at it all the time. They are now concentrating on some very gene rich areas and sequencing them in full as they are finding that many genes are clustered in these gene rich areas. What Celera is doing is full genome sequencing where they are sequencing not just the expressed parts (introns) but also the unexpressed "junk DNA" parts (exons). This will let Celera catch those rarely and even never expressed genes that INCY will miss, but they will be bogged down with the 80% or so of the genome that is non-expressed. This will ultimately be great info to have too as it is suspected that some of this "junk" DNA is involved in regulation and feedback mechanisms of gene expression for instance. I suspect that there is a lot of stuff that will appeal to developmental biologists too. However, it is questionable as to the commercial value of this information. As far as this Pharma consortium goes though, they are only going after SNPs, which are single nucleotide variations in genes. They are not really going into full bore competition with INCY as they will not be trying to sequence all the genes. I think that there are a lot of patent questions that will come up in all of this too. If INCY has a patent on a particular gene, or even ESTs that are part of a gene, and then the pharmas find an SNP in this gene, will they still have to license the INCY patent??? I mean we are really talking the same gene here with only a single base pair different. If the PTOs talk about having to license the picture tube from its mfg to make a TV holds up, it would seem that INCY will be able to block usage of genes that contain the ESTs even if it a variety with an SNP. It will also get grey as to if it is even really the same gene in some ways. As DNA evolves, genes get copied, then the copies start to get mutated individually, thus you can have multiple copies of almost identical genes on the same chromosome. Will an EST that matches all the copies be a blocking patent for all the genes? Hmmm, this could get ugly and could go either way. Full length genes are a bit clearer in this regard, but you will still see the same issue - if a gene varies by only one base pair, and is damn near identical, does that get around the patent? Also, when INCY does the patents, it is my understanding that they claim the redundant codons for the various amino acids (20 AA and 64 codons, thus some AA have multiple codons). These are pretty meaningless SNPs because they code for the same protein even though the DNA is different. OK, I've now completely confused the issue. The pharmas sure are being cheap about this effort by the way. They are using cheapo unreliable university labor and only ponying up $45M (more than half from the Wellcome Trust). INCY is putting about $200M into their efforts this year alone. Plus, the reason they bought Hexagen is for the new tech they have for finding SNPs faster and easier than before. Are the pharmas using old tech??? Only time will tell. Myself I think SNPs are still overrated and a current fad! Rman