Power databases: 1st in a series
Founder’ groups being used for genetic bioprospecting
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
With the growth of genomics comes new terms or new uses for older ones. Here are just two that you are likely to be seeing more often these days: bioprospecting and "founder" populations.
Both refer to newly-developed techniques for exploring human genetics. The key strategy in these efforts is the creation of huge and very specialized databases, which then are used as informational laboratories to ex plore the sources of disease.
One of the most intriguing examples of this new bio-prospecting strategy is in identifying and studying founder populations: groups of individuals, usually relatively small, made up of individuals descended from a limited number of common ancestors. In most cases, founder populations are the result of geographic or cultural isolation which tends to prevent dilution of their gene pools by outside groups.
Perhaps the purest example of such an effort currently is under way in Iceland, with that country’s government late last year approving a bill that essentially will turn its entire population into a living and continuously evolving laboratory for genomics research.
The project is the brainchild of the Icelandic firm deCODE Genetics, which will mine the considerable resources of the country’s genealogical and genetic history for tracing disease patterns and the genetic mutations that may be their cause.
Key to the effort is the fact that the entire country is a founder population. Because of its unique history and isolated location, Iceland’s gene pool is considered very similar to that of the Vikings who put first roots down in the country 1,000 years ago in its "founding" stages.
Iceland is especially well-suited for the creation of a huge genetic database for other reasons as well: Most Icelanders, numbering about 270,000. have kept detailed family trees, and medical records on every Icelander have been maintained since World War I. Further, since the 1940s, a large number of tissues samples of the country’s people have been stored, thereby offering a vast and ready-made library of DNA.
These various factors aren’t being used by deCODE only as a pure research kind of exercise. The company is attempting to make some financial hay as well, through its agreement with the Icelandic government which gives it exclusive rights to the information it obtains for 12 years. It has signed a deal with Roche (Basel Switzerland), calling for the company to focus its research on particular diseases as a foundation for new genetic therapies which Roche then hopes to develop.
In a similar effort, Algene Biotechnologies (Montreal) recently signed a $5 million agreement with Myriad Genetics (Salt Lake City) for discovery of causal and protective genes that could lead to new therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar depression and schizophrenia.
Algene’s research is based primarily on founder populations in Canada, though the company said it has recently identified other such populations elsewhere in the world. Vice president of administration and finance for Algene, Michel Gosselin, said his company’s strategy will be to use the founder populations it has identified to "collect case samples and do genotyping" to narrow its focus on those genes in the three disease areas.
Another aspect of its effort is a collaboration with the Centre Hospitalier Cote-des-Nelges, a geriatric center that is affiliated with the University of Montreal.
Payment of the funds by Myriad will be based on Algene meeting research milestones. Additionally, Myriad will be assigned exclusive rights to the findings, making further royalty payments to Algene as products are commercialized.
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