He rose to become R&D chief and took over a $4-billion-a-year R&D drug pipeline filled with risky bets and under criticism from Wall Street. It directly competes with another biotech, Regeneron, which has its own mega-project to sequence the genomes of 100,000 people. That creates a “founder effect” in which some otherwise unusual genetic variants are much more common, allowing for analysis of their effects.Īmgen isn’t the only biotechnology company searching for genetic variables that may lead to good health. The Iceland database is among the most valuable because most of its citizens descend from a small number of original settlers who arrived there in the Dark Ages. “If you can reduce that even incrementally, you can have a big impact.” “The biggest problem in this industry is failure,” said Harper in an interview last year about DeCode. ![]() But lab mice rarely predict how humans will respond. That is hugely advantageous when compared to the usual way that companies test drugs-in animal models of human disease. ![]() ![]() What that means is that DeCode, which also has access to health records, can study walking, breathing examples of what someone would be like if they had taken a given protein-blocking drug their whole life. In many cases, it happens that the DNA variations with the largest, most helpful effects actually destroy a gene’s function and stop it from making a protein (each of us is missing working copies of at least several of the total 20,000-gene complement that humans have). What Amgen is searching for are versions of genes that protect against disease. That’s because the Icelandic scientists don’t only discover what biological process to tinker with, they can also help predict what the results of doing so will be long before any volunteer takes a drug. At a meeting with investors last year in which he touted the importance of DeCode’s work, Harper referred only to the discovery of a “Gene X.”Īmgen is betting that using DeCode’s database will slash the time it takes to develop drugs. The findings, described publicly today in the New England Journal of Medicine, were first made in July 2014 and since then Amgen has worked to further understand the biology of the gene and started developing candidate drugs. Kari Stefansson, the CEO and founder of DeCode, calls scouring databases in this fashion for protective genes a new way of creating drugs that isn’t based “on a beautiful hypothesis or lucky chemistry” but the facts of human biology as experienced by thousands of people. In addition the proteome provides some measure of time because levels of proteins in blood rise and they fall as a function of time to and from events," said Kari Stefansson CEO of deCODE genetics and one of the senior authors on the paper.Amgen had sales of $22 billion last year and is looking to gene databases for new drug ideas. "Proteomics can assist in solving one of the major challenges in genetic studies: to determine what gene is responsible for the effect of a sequence variant on a disease. They integrated associations of sequence variants with protein levels and diseases and other traits, and found that 12% of around fifty thousand variants reported to associate with diseases and other traits also associate with protein levels. The levels of proteins in plasma were tested for associations with 373 diseases and other traits and yielded 257,490 such associations. Additionally, they replicated 83% and 64% of the reported associations from the largest existing plasma proteomic studies, based on the Somascan method and the antibody-based Olink assay, respectively. Overall, 93% of the associations are novel. They found 18,084 associations between variants in the sequence and levels of proteins, where 19% are with rare variants identified with whole-genome sequencing. ![]() Using protein levels in plasma measured with the Somascan proteomics assay, scientists at deCODE genetics tested the association of 27 million sequence variants with plasma levels of 4,719 proteins in 35,559 Icelanders. Previous studies of the genetics of protein levels either consisted of much fewer individuals or tested far fewer proteins than the one published today. Scientists at deCODE genetics have used levels of five thousand proteins in plasma targeted on a multiplex platform at population scale to unravel their genetic determinants and their relationship with human disease and other traits.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |