90% of Genetic Code Unraveled, Celera Claims
A private company that is racing to be the first to map the human genome claimed Monday that it has now deciphered more than 90% of the material that goes into the human genetic code--a signal that the search for the Holy Grail of biotechnology is likely to be completed in a matter of months.
Celera Genomics Group, a Rockville, Md., subsidiary of PE Corp., said it expects to have a “rough draft” of the entire code by early summer. If it succeeds, it could end up with patents on much of the blueprint for the human body and a lucrative role in the development of new, genetically engineered drugs, tests and treatments.
Announcement of Celera’s accomplishment sent the company’s stock up $55.06 a share to close $242 on the New York Stock Exchange. The stocks of other genetics companies also jumped at the news.
Celera’s aggressive decoding drive competes directly with the federally funded Human Genome Project, a worldwide effort orchestrated by the National Institutes of Health.
Although Celera executives have said they will eventually release some of their information to publicly funded researchers in hospitals and universities, they have so far shared it only with their drug company clients. In addition, they have continued to file thousands of provisional patent applications in apparent contradiction of previous assurances that they would file for only a few hundred patents.
By contrast, the public genome project is making its findings freely available on a daily basis.
Celera executives could barely contain their enthusiasm for their efforts Monday. “This is not only a monumental moment in Celera’s history but also in the history of medicine,” declared J. Craig Venter, the firm’s president and chief scientific officer. “We have most of the human genome.”
“This may be one of the most pivotal moments in the history of life sciences,” added Tony L. White, chairman and chief executive of PE, Celera’s parent company.
However, outsiders expressed considerable skepticism about what Celera has achieved thus far and how it is handling its findings.
“What they’ve got is the equivalent of a lot of puzzle pieces in a pile on the floor,” said Kathy L. Hudson, assistant director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which oversees the genome project. “They’ve got to have the pieces before they can put the puzzle together. But let’s be clear, it is not together yet.”
“The idea of all these patent applications is of significant concern to us,” said Rodney Howell, president of the American College of Medical Genetics, the national professional organization of doctors and others who use genetic information to treat patients. “Our view is that the genetic code belongs to the public.”
Such controversy is likely to swirl with increasing intensity in the coming months as Celera and the genome project rush to complete the mapping of the genetic code, the 3-billion-letter blueprint spelled out by DNA molecules that governs the activities of every cell in the body. And the disputes will not remain confined to broad philosophical issues, but will quickly dive into the highly technical and the personal.
Technically, one of the key issues will almost certainly be what constitutes a complete map of the code. Celera and the Human Genome Project are using very different strategies to unravel the information, and that is pushing them toward very different answers.
The publicly funded project, which was launched in 1990, divides a sample of human DNA into smaller pieces--often compared with chapters in a book, or volumes in an encyclopedia. Then it breaks those pieces into smaller units. Twenty centers around the world have divided up the work of putting the smaller pieces together as they are deciphered.
This approach recently allowed scientists to announce that they had completed the sequencing of an entire human chromosome--one of 23 pairs of chromosomes that occur in almost every human cell.
Celera scientists have used what has been called a “shotgun” technique. They take several copies of the genome, break them into millions of fragments and decode each fragment. Because the pieces of one fragmented copy overlap those of the others, scientists can figure out their proper order. It is like taking several copies of a book that have been cut into little pieces and then reconstructing the text by finding the overlapping sentences.
The downside of the Celera approach is that it cannot assemble the entire genome until it has deciphered all those millions of pieces.
“The question of this approach is: Can you put Humpty Dumpty together again?” said William Haseltine, chairman and CEO of Human Genome Sciences, a company that is developing drugs based on gene discovery.
