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virus: Project Will Seek to Uncover Genetic Roots of Major Diseases
« on: 2003-05-30 16:27:44 » |
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Project Will Seek to Uncover Genetic Roots of Major Diseases
By NICHOLAS WADE
A new approach to identifying the genes involved in complex illnesses
like cancer and heart disease will be announced today by the Center for
the Advancement of Genomics in Rockville, Md., and Duke University.
The goal is to jump-start the long-discussed idea of bringing genomic
data to bear on people's health risks, based on the premise that all
diseases have a genetic component.
Dr. J. Craig Venter, president of the Maryland center, is a leading
expert in sequencing genomes, the operation of identifying the sequence
of DNA units that encode the genetic information in a person's genome.
He said he was opening a large center in June that could sequence 48
billion units of DNA a year.
This would enable the group to sequence many genes from a large number
of patients, looking for mutations — changes in the DNA units — that
might be associated with higher risk of disease.
Dr. Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs at Duke, said the
collaboration grew out of a conversation he had several months ago with
Dr. Venter in which he had become enamored of the idea of including
genomic information in health care planning. "One of the powers of
genomic information will be determining individualized risk for disease
and response to therapy," Dr. Snyderman said.
Physicians at Duke's medical center plan to draw up lists of human genes
considered likely to play a role in diseases of interest, like the 100
or so genes that may, when mutated, play a role in coronary artery
disease. Dr. Venter's center would sequence the full DNA of these 100
genes from large numbers of patients, looking for the mutations that
seemed to be linked to the disease. These mutations could then be used
to assess the risk for coronary artery disease in the population at
large.
The collaboration, to be called the Genomic-Based Prospective Medicine
project, will focus first on heart disease, a form of cancer yet to be
selected and aspects of infectious disease. Dr. Venter said that all
findings would be published in the scientific literature, and that other
universities were welcome to join.
At his new center, the cost of sequencing DNA will be as low as $1 for
800 DNA units, he said, a substantial saving on current costs.
The genes behind single-gene diseases are now easy to identify, but
these diseases are relatively rare. Common diseases, like cancer and
diabetes, are thought to be caused by many variant genes acting in
concert. But because each variant gene makes only a small contribution,
it has been hard to identify them.
The Venter-Duke project joins two other large-scale efforts to identify
the genetic roots of common diseases. One is the study by Decode
Genetics of virtually the entire Icelandic population, based on a
comprehensive genealogy that allows patients to be put into pedigrees.
Dr. Kari Stefansson, president of the company, said on Tuesday that he
had now mapped genes for 40 common diseases to their approximate
location on the genome and had identified specific causative genes in 14
of them.
A second project is the HapMap approach developed at the Whitehead
Institute in Cambridge, Mass., with the support of the National
Institutes of Health.
The project's scientists have identified parts of the genome that have
been inherited in large blocks from the ancestral human population,
despite the shuffling of DNA that takes place between generations. They
hope to use the blocks as shortcuts to finding disease genes.
--
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"Reminding you to help control the human population. Have your sexual
partner spayed or neutered."
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