Olympic anti-doping lab will become medical and genetic research centre

The
anti-doping laboratories built for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
will be developed into the world's first Phenome Research Centre; the term 'phenome'
referring to the overall expression of a person's characteristics and traits as determined by the interaction of genetics and environment.

Announcing the new facility, the Prime Minister,
David Cameron, said the centre would 'take advantage of the extraordinary
opportunities that lie in combining genetic data with the results of medical
tests on tissues and blood. It will allow us to understand the characteristics
of disease and how these link into genes and our environment'.

The
testing facility, originally a partnership between drug control scientists at
King's College London and owners GlaxoSmithKline, is based in Harlow, Essex. The
lab tests blood and urine samples of every medallist and a randomised selection
of other athletes for more than 240 banned substances.

The
Phenome Centre project will use a portion of the lab's equipment to analyse
patient and volunteer samples to look for biological markers of disease present
in the human phenome.

Funding
for the centre for its first five years has been secured by £5 million
investments from both the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for
Health Research (NIHR). Operations at the centre will be led by a collaboration
of universities headed by Imperial College London with the aim of analysing up
to 25,000 samples in the first year and scaling up to analyse an estimated
100,000 samples in the years after. The labs will still be available for use by
private medical companies.

According
to a statement released by the MRC, researchers will be able to analyse samples
'very rapidly and on an unprecedented scale. This will help them to discover
new "biomarkers" to explain why one individual or population may be
more susceptible to a disease than another'.

Health
Secretary Andrew Lansley said that research performed at the centre 'promises
better targeted treatments for patients with a wide range of diseases, such as
diabetes, heart disease and dementia'.

Mr
Cameron announced the opening of the MRC-NIHR Phenome Research Centre at the
Global Health Policy Summit in London. The switch over from anti-doping
operations is planned for early October with business expected to start in January
2013.