In The Field

ASHG: What we stand to GAIN

OK – so genetics hasn’t delivered a slam dunk cure for fat. You still have to give up chocolate cake if you want to lose weight. As our interloper asked this morning, what gives? Where’s the wonder drug that’s going to save our sorry asses from dieting and exercising?


Well, there are lots of reasons why we don’t have it yet. But one of the major ones is that the human genome contains so much information that it’s difficult and expensive to pull out the “signal” amid the “noise.” It’s hard to pinpoint the few genes that control body fat, for example, when they’re buried in so much other DNA, and when each one of the “fat” genes only accounts for a small part of a big belly.

That was part of the reason why scientists made the HapMap – basically, it was supposed to winnow down the amount of noise that scientists had to slog through in their search for the signals. But it’s still a bit expensive to do a genome scan using the HapMap data, even though it’s getting cheaper all the time.

So the U.S. National Institutes of Health has enlisted support from Big Pharma to help with the job. Pfizer, Abbott, the NIH, two biotech companies and Harvard University are spending $26 million to do massive gene hunts in a handful of diseases. Their partnership – called GAIN – announced its first six targets yesterday.

And – go ahead and call me cynical – but is it a sheer coincidence that some of Big Pharma’s traditional cash cows top GAIN’s wishlist? GAIN’s first funded grants are looking for genes involved in diseases like depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder…chronic, common illnesses, without good cures, that force patients to take medicines for a long time. But, Francis Collins – head of the National Human Genome Research Institute – says market forces didn’t play any role in helping GAIN choose its targets.

To be fair, these are also awful illnesses. And the drugs we have now leave a lot of patients high and dry. And all GAIN’s data goes straight into the public domain, which is something that doesn’t usually happen in parterships with the drug industry. GAIN also asks people not to file patents that will block research on the data – but the project can’t legally enforce this. So it’ll be really interesting to see how this goes over the next few years. If GAIN turns up any good genes, what’s going to happen to the project’s equitable ground rules?

Comments

Comments are closed.