Having churned out a map of the human genome, Celera Genomics is now stepping into a new race, one already cluttered with competitors. Joined by two other divisions of its parent company, Applera Corporation, Celera plans to sort through the genome it decoded and pinpoint bits of genes crucial in designing new diagnostic tests and drugs.
Applera is investing about $75 million over the next year in the venture. The cost will be borne equally by Celera Genomics and the other two participants, Foster City, Calif.-based Applied Biosystems; and Alameda, Calif.-based Celera Diagnostics, a new company. Applied Biosystems sells technology to analyze DNA and proteins, while Celera Diagnostics is developing gene-based methods of diagnosing and predicting disease.
Among the most daunting challenges in genetics is how to separate the roughly one percent of information in the genome that is critical to medicine from the other 99 percent, which has no known useful function.
Celera will sequence DNA from 40 or 50 individuals, and use that information as the basis for discovering single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. SNPs are the spots in DNA that differ from individual to individual. There are several million spots of SNP in the human genome, of which a couple hundred thousand are thought to be linked to diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. The key is finding them among 3 billion DNA bases and then understanding what they mean.
That's what Rockville, Md.-based Celera, a company that sets ambitious goals often unlikely to yield big financial returns in the short run, has set out to do. "This has been in the works for a long time," Craig Venter, Celera's president and chief scientific officer, said of the SNP venture. "This was something that was always obvious to do as a next step."
Celera isn't the first company to make SNP research a priority. A host of other companies are already studying SNPs and, in some cases, working with pharmaceutical corporations to link SNPs with different diseases. Orchid Biosciences, a biotechnology firm in Princeton, N.J., analyzes samples from patients, provided by drug companies such as AstraZeneca, to help identify the links between SNPs and illnesses. Boston-based Millenium Pharmaceuticals has multi-year agreements with drugmakers Bayer and Aventis to discover new drugs, in part by studying SNPs.
In addition, 10 drugmakers have put together an SNP consortium that is making its findings public. And the publicly funded Human Genome Project, which sequenced the human genome alongside Celera, is beginning a broad SNP search, as well.
Celera, which has one of the nation's largest civilian computer complex, could conceivably surge ahead of companies such as Orchid in the SNP race. But scientists say that when it comes to applying SNPs to drug development, the goals are much broader and vaguer than they were during the race to sequence the human genome.
"Unlike the moon shot that the sequencing of the human genome represented, where there's such a well defined goal, the next age of value development of genetic diversity is going to be characterized by diversity itself," says Dale Pfost, the CEO of Orchid. "There's going to be a range of strategies."
Venter emphasizes that, in his view, there are still too few companies trying to make sense of the genome. "With six billion people on the planet, predicting all the diseases – we're talking about a century or more of work," he says.
For its part, Celera is tight-lipped about how or whether it will share the SNP data it gathers. The company has repeatedly stated plans to design its own drugs and, according to Venter, might choose not to offer biotech and pharmaceutical firms subscriptions to a SNP database, as it's done for its human genome data.
On Tuesday, Celera's stock closed down $1.46, or 0.5 percent, at $29.25.
