Big pharma teams with government on genomic research
pharmafile | March 27, 2015 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | AbbVie, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Cameron, Dimension Therapeutics, GSK, Genomic, Genomics england, Helomics, Roche, Takeda, UCB, UK, genomes
Ten firms will partner up with Genomics England to develop new diagnostics and treatments for people with rare diseases and cancers.
The pharma and biotech companies are part of the GENE Consortium, a public private partnership that will analyse the DNA sequences of people with rare diseases and cancers to find new research targets.
The industry partners will each contribute funding and scientists to work on the 100,000 Genomes Project – the initiative launched by David Cameron in 2012 which aims to sequences the genomes of 100,000 people in the UK. It is the largest national investment in genome science in the world.
So far 3,000 genomes have been sequenced. The consortium members will have access to information from another 2,000 collected from the first stage of the project, for a year-long industry trial, and Genomics England will also collaborate with companies that specialise in big data analysis.
Commenting on Genomics England’s Clinical Interpretation Partnership, Professor Mark Caulfield who is its chief scientist says: “This partnership brings together over 4,000 UK clinicians and scientists as well as over 500 international collaborators at the forefront of Genomic Medicine. They have all committed to work on the 100,000 Genomes Project to drive up the quality of clinical interpretation to ensure that we feedback more new diagnoses to NHS patients.
“Excitingly many proposals offer added dimensions to the programme such as ethics, social science, state-of the art analytical methods, and advanced machine learning. We hope that this unique collaboration will lead to earlier and more precise diagnoses for patients and, working with companies, will pave the way for new, more targeted therapies and treatments.”
The ten companies to sign up to the GENE Consortium are:
AbbVie
Alexion Pharmaceuticals
AstraZeneca
Biogen
Dimension Therapeutics
GSK
Helomics
Roche
Takeda
UCB (subject to contract negotiation and signature)
Lilian Anekwe
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