DNA sampling for 'smart drugs' study
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London - Scientists are embarking on a ten-year, £1.4 billion ($2bn) project to research the DNA of two million people in a drive to develop new ‘smart drugs’.
The British-led project is trying to find treatments for diseases such as cancer, asthma, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. The consortium includes scientists from Cambridge University and AstraZeneca.
Ruth March, a spokesman for the drug giant, said: “We are going to be researching two million genomes, an unprecedented number.”
“That’s necessary because we are going to be looking for rare differences between individuals. We hope this will mean we will be able to create more precise drugs, rather than just treating the symptoms.”
Differences found by the scientists will allow better drug treatments to specifically target an individual’s disease. For example, while two people have asthma symptoms, they may come from different genetic causes.
The scientists are ‘sequencing’ or reading the genome, which is the full set of instructions for creating every cell and organ of our bodies.
It costs hundreds of pounds to sequence all the data in one person’s genome, and two million people is estimated to cost £1.4 bn ($2bn). The amount of data sampled – 5 petabytes – could be saved on a stack of DVDs four times higher than the Shard skyscraper in London.
The project is only possible because new technology allows DNA codes to be read a million times faster than two years ago.
The centre for the research will be at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge.
Craig Venter, who led the team that first sequenced the human genome 16 years ago and is one of the scientists involved in the project, said: ‘We’ve been waiting for the technology to do this for the past 15 years.”
“We need very large numbers of genomes to find the micro-differences between us.”
Venter also revealed that police could soon be able to build photofit images from a small sample of DNA left at a crime scene.
He said technology exists that creates images of people’s faces from their DNA – a development which will revolutionise crime fighting.
Venter added that the same technology allows parents to discover what their unborn child will look like.
Daily Mail