the Genome Payoff

[Dave]

Awaiting the Genome Payoff


Laura Pedrick for The New York Times


NORTH WALES, Pa. — At Merck’s “automated biotechnology facility” here, robot arms adapted from automobile factories deftly shuttle plates containing human cells.

Assisted by the robots and other complex machinery, scientists are studying what happens to the cells as each of the roughly 22,000 human genes is turned off. They hope to find the genes involved in different diseases, the starting point for creating a drug.

It is a merger of sophisticated biology and brute force made possible only because the Human Genome Project provided the identity of all the human genes. But as with so much else that has spun off from the genome project, it is also an expensive gamble, with success far from assured.

“Can I point to a single drug right now that this has facilitated?” said Michele Cleary, Merck’s senior director for automated biotechnology. “No, because we are in the early stages of this. There’s information feeding into the early stages of the pipeline that we’ll see the fruits of in years to come.”

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project, in June 2000, its application to drug development is still, at best, a work in progress. But while many genetics scientists outside the drug industry say the project has had few medical benefits, industry researchers urge a wait-and-see patience.

In fact, some of the first drugs based on genomic studies are now starting to reach the market. Several new “targeted” cancer drugs, for instance, block the effects of genetic abnormalities that spur tumor growth. A drug from the biotech giant Amgen, an osteoporosis treatment called Prolia, was approved two weeks ago. The company got its initial clue for the drug by making different genes in mice overactive. Mice with one particular overactive gene had unusually thick bones.

And the drug company Human Genome Sciences, founded in 1992 as the genome project was just getting under way, applied last week for approval of Benlysta, which could be the first new drug in decades for treating lupus.

That is nothing like the cornucopia of new drugs that some experts predicted the genome project would yield. A decade ago, drug companies spent billions of dollars equipping themselves to harness the newly revealed secrets of human biology. Investors bid the stocks of tiny genomics companies to stratospheric heights.

That “genome bubble” has long since popped. And not only has there been no pharmacopoeia, but some experts say the Human Genome Project might have at least temporarily bogged down the drug industry with information overload.

CONTINUED AT:

www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/business/15genome.html


... and a little scary, too. The nightmare, of course, is a "killer gene" escaping from the laboratory and killing humanity.