[Commons-Law] Giving its DNA code away

[Ram]

"This data just wants to be public," said a pleased Collins, who is
also director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "It's
the kind of fundamental information that has no direct connection to a
product, it's information that everybody wants, and it will find its
way into the public."


>Baltimore Sun
Giving its DNA code away

Public domain: The for-profit rival in the race to map the human
genome will give its DNA sequences to a national biotechnology center.


 
By Tricia Bishop
Sun Staff

April 27, 2005


Five years ago on a summer day in the East Room of the White House,
then-President Bill Clinton and Tony Blair - the British prime
minister weighing in by satellite - hailed the mapping of the human
genome as "the first great technological triumph of the 21st century."
It was an achievement that many said would one day lead to eradication
of disease and the creation of made-to-order, individualized drugs.

On each side of the president were the beaming victors, ready to reap
the spoils: a brash, but brilliant scientist named J. Craig Venter,
then president of Celera Genomics Group of Rockville, and the
accomplished Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, an
international consortium of academic laboratories led by the National
Institutes of Health.

The two factions - the first for profit, the second not - had been
bitter rivals in the race to sequence human genes, egging each other
forward and ultimately, diplomatically, agreeing to share worldwide
credit for identifying the human recipe.

Neither, however, seemed willing to give on one point of contention:
whether the data belonged in the public or private domain - until
yesterday.

During a routine conference call to discuss quarterly earnings
yesterday morning, Celera Genomics announced that after July 1 it
would contribute much of its hard-earned DNA sequence data to public
domain through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a
division of the National Institutes of Health.

"This data just wants to be public," said a pleased Collins, who is
also director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "It's
the kind of fundamental information that has no direct connection to a
product, it's information that everybody wants, and it will find its
way into the public."

Celera Genomics, a unit of Connecticut-based Applera Corp., was unable
to make a commercial success trading in the genetic information. It
has spent the past three years slowly dismantling its foundation as a
supplier of genetic data to instead concentrate on drug development, a
transformation that will become official this summer.

"This has been a very long kind of planned exit strategy from that
business," Peter Dworkin, Applera's vice president for investor
relations, said in an interview. "We're coming to an end of that
period."

Also coming to an official end is a contest that has raged for years,
begun when Celera increased efforts to map the human genome by
declaring it, too, would tackle the project, despite an eight-year
head start by public laboratories.


A competition 

The story began in 1998, when Applera created Celera Genomics to
leverage technology developed by another of its holdings, Applied
Biosystems. Applied Biosystems had created the means to sequence genes
being used by scientists within the Human Genome Project, under way
since 1990.

Celera's presence turned the project into a competition, both
frustrating and fruitful for the consortium scientists, who were
suddenly forced to speed up their efforts and consider other
possibilities.

Access to the resulting information was a battleground from the start,
with some opposing Celera's efforts because they feared the company
would try to patent the genes and lay claim to the human gene code.
Shortly before the historic joint announcement in June 2000 that the
first full-length record of human DNA had been catalogued, both
Clinton and Blair had argued for "unencumbered access" to the data.

And Celera obliged, with a caveat: cost. 

Many believed there was money to be made on the data itself, selling
access to it or developing drugs based on it. But it was much easier
said than done, and a venture that some say is still best suited to
the world of grant-funded research, which can focus on discoveries
with less worry about the bottom line.

Celera's get-rich plan was to sell subscriptions to the genetic
information, and get "income from customers using our data to make
discoveries," Venter, the company's former president, said in 2000.

What he and his colleagues didn't quite seem to grasp was that their
counterparts in academia had similar information, and they weren't
going to charge for access to it.

Others ran into similar situations, discovering that academics were
publishing their research on the Internet, accessible to anyone with a
computer and a connection. Incyte Pharmaceuticals of Delaware, for
example, began life as a company that sells genomic research
databases, but today - like Celera - is becoming a "leading drug
discovery and development company by building a proprietary product
pipeline of novel small molecule drugs," according to its Web site.


Stocks soared 

"People don't want to pay for it if it's going to become free," said
Constance Hsai, a biotechnology analyst who follows Celera Genomics
for SG Cowen Securities Corp. in New York. Hsai owns five shares of
the company's stock, bought years ago when she was a graduate student
and stocks for companies working on the human genome map were soaring,
peaking at $247 per share in March 2000.

They've since fallen back to earth: Celera Genomics' stock fell 30
cents yesterday to close at $10.07 on the New York Stock Exchange.

"This was all uncharted territory, we were trailblazers and pioneers
in this area. ... We really helped kind of create this era of genomic
science," Dworkin said. "You can't know everything when you start
out."

Venter resigned from the business in 2002, shortly before the company
announced it would shift gears and stop marketing its genome
databases. Those resources would instead go toward developing
products.

Applied Biosystems still makes technology others can use in
interpreting the information, whether they've paid for access to it or
found it free on the Web.

"It's a natural evolution of genome science," said Dennis Gilbert,
chief scientific officer of Applied Biosystems. "The payoff from the
human genome is discoveries people will make, and that's the phase
we're entering now."

Those affiliated with the Human Genome Project say Celera's
information had become outdated as well because they stopped at
mapping a draft of the human genome, while the public consortium
worked until 2003 to complete its data.

"In many ways, the product that Celera was holding onto decreased in
value," said Aristedes Patrinos, who represented the U.S. Department
of Energy in the Human Genome Project. He also lent the use of his
basement to the two sides in May 2000, when, over jalapeno pizza,
Venter and Collins agreed to share credit.

Patrinos said he believes Venter, who could not be reached yesterday,
would want the information public. Venter is busy with other
enterprises these days, though.

He's started his own non-profit organization - the J. Craig Venter
Institute, based in Rockville - "dedicated to the advancement of the
science of genomics" and understanding its societal implications.
Currently, his institute is working on projects to catalog the genomic
spectrum found in air, as well the various microbes in marine and
terrestrial environments. Venter has sailed around the globe
collecting data.


Seeing variations 

Collins said the information released by Celera to the National Center
for Biotechnology Information - certain human, mouse and rat DNA
sequences - will likely not do much to further assembly of genomes,
though it will be useful in demonstrating how data differs in
different subjects.

"I give a lot of credit to [Applied Biosystems] and Celera," Collins
said. "It does make sort of the battle days of what appeared to be an
unpleasant race a distant memory."


-- 
Prabhu Ram,
Max-Planck-Institut for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law,
MarstallPlatz 1, 
80539 Munich
GERMANY

Tel: + 49 89 24246226
Mob: + 49 17629830521
Web: http://infoserve.blogspot.com