An unprecedented consortium of ten global pharmaceutical companies, the UK's Wellcome Trust, and five research institutes will pool their resources to draw up a $45m (£30m) map of the variations in the human genetic code, or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). This alliance, called the SNP Consortium, also announced last week that...
DNA chip technology is a growing industry that could revolutionise disease diagnosis. Current laboratory techniques for detecting genetic mutations responsible for disease are both time-consuming and expensive, whereas, a DNA chip - once developed - should only take minutes or, at most, hours to detect the gene mutations at the root of...
Two prominent science bodies in Australia have delivered similar recommendations on the regulation and ethics of human cloning. Both the Australian Academy of Science and the Human Genome Project (HUGO) recommend that reproductive cloning be prohibited, whilst supporting therapeutic cloning under ethical guidelines, peer review and public scrutiny. The academy...
Japan's inadequate response to intensifying competition in international genome research was highlighted last week, when the future of the Japanese government's Rice Genome Sequencing Project was thrown into doubt by the news that Celera Genomics - the US company set up by geneticist J. Craig Venter - plans to sequence the entire...
Venture capitalists are demanding better terms from the biotechnology companies that they back. This follows on from the well reported troubles of British Biotech. Although a report to be released by the accountancy firm Ernst & Young confirms that the UK still leads the £30b European biotech sector, it also warns...
The terms of reference and membership of the newly formed Genetics and Insurance Committee (GAIC) were announced by Tessa Jowell, the UK's Minister for Public Health, following last week's initial meeting. GAIC's primary task will be to ensure that genetic tests are only used in assessing insurance premiums when it...
Plans to set up a national register of children conceived using a relatively new infertility treatment have been given the go-ahead by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the body that governs fertility treatments in the UK. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), used to treat male infertility, has resulted in...
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Is the SNP consortium philanthropy in action?
by Professor Marcus Pembrey
The Wellcome Trust is to fund 67% of a two year, $45m (£30m), international project to define some 300,000 DNA sequence variations in the human genome. The remaining funds come from a consortium of ten of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, who have also agreed to put the newly discovered...