A PRIVATE company announced plans this week to sequence the human genome by
2001, four years sooner than the target date set by the publicly funded Human
Genome Project.
All the data will be made freely available to researchers. 鈥淲e decided it
would be morally wrong to keep the data secret,鈥� says Craig Venter, president of
the still unnamed company and founder of The Institute for Genomic Research
(TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland.
Formed by TIGR and Perkin-Elmer, a scientific equipment manufacturer in
Norwalk, Connecticut, the new company will use powerful DNA sequencing machines
to read the 30 billion bases in human DNA within three years. 鈥淵ou may describe
this as the full monty,鈥� says Venter. He estimates that sequencing the genome
will cost around $200 million.
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鈥淲e will take a large number of machines and build a super genome-sequencing
factory,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he raw sequence data will be freely accessible in the
public databases, provided they can handle the amount of data we produce.鈥�
The news may prompt the US Congress to reconsider its budget of $3
billion for the Human Genome Project, half of which has already been spent, with
97 per cent of the genome still to be sequenced. But Venter says that the new
company is keen to collaborate with its public counterparts.
Francis Collins, head of the genome project at the National Institutes of
Health near Washington DC, says he welcomes the new initiative, but adds: 鈥淚t
would be really premature to change the plans for our own centres, given that
this is new and it鈥檚 not clear what the outcome will be.鈥�
The new company hopes to make money by identifying single-nucleotide
polymorphisms, subtle variations in the same gene that predispose particular
individuals to disease, and dictate which medicines will work for them. This
information, which takes extra effort to tease out, will be sold to
pharmaceuticals companies.