Gene breakthroughs are no guarantee of commercial success. He says DeCode has returned results “that you can really take to the bank.” “What we are really interested in is very compelling evidence between human variation and big, big risk of disease,” Harper says. Some analysts felt Amgen's research hadn't paid off and even asked if the company should be broken up or stop doing R&D.īuying DeCode was part of a wider bet by Amgen that it can deliver the kind of breakthroughs the public always expected as the result of the human genome project. He rose to become R&D chief and took over a $4-billion-a-year R&D drug pipeline filled with risky bets and under criticism from Wall Street. ![]() It directly competes with another biotech, Regeneron, which has its own mega-project to sequence the genomes of 100,000 people. That creates a “founder effect” in which some otherwise unusual genetic variants are much more common, allowing for analysis of their effects.Īmgen isn’t the only biotechnology company searching for genetic variables that may lead to good health. The Iceland database is among the most valuable because most of its citizens descend from a small number of original settlers who arrived there in the Dark Ages. “If you can reduce that even incrementally, you can have a big impact.” “The biggest problem in this industry is failure,” said Harper in an interview last year about DeCode. But lab mice rarely predict how humans will respond. That is hugely advantageous when compared to the usual way that companies test drugs-in animal models of human disease. What that means is that DeCode, which also has access to health records, can study walking, breathing examples of what someone would be like if they had taken a given protein-blocking drug their whole life. In many cases, it happens that the DNA variations with the largest, most helpful effects actually destroy a gene’s function and stop it from making a protein (each of us is missing working copies of at least several of the total 20,000-gene complement that humans have). What Amgen is searching for are versions of genes that protect against disease. That’s because the Icelandic scientists don’t only discover what biological process to tinker with, they can also help predict what the results of doing so will be long before any volunteer takes a drug. At a meeting with investors last year in which he touted the importance of DeCode’s work, Harper referred only to the discovery of a “Gene X.”Īmgen is betting that using DeCode’s database will slash the time it takes to develop drugs. The findings, described publicly today in the New England Journal of Medicine, were first made in July 2014 and since then Amgen has worked to further understand the biology of the gene and started developing candidate drugs. Kari Stefansson, the CEO and founder of DeCode, calls scouring databases in this fashion for protective genes a new way of creating drugs that isn’t based “on a beautiful hypothesis or lucky chemistry” but the facts of human biology as experienced by thousands of people. And I think there is nothing else that matters here.Amgen had sales of $22 billion last year and is looking to gene databases for new drug ideas. They started to test before the virus had arrived. "Basically, the authorities in Iceland prepared for it. "The entire world knew that there was an epidemic mounting in China in January," he said. Stefánsson said an early, aggressive response to the Covid-19 outbreak is more important in limiting its spread than overall population or population density. "So this is all a question of the will, the desire, the determination, to do this properly and my guess is to do that, there needs to be some sort of a central control," he said. has probably "5,000 times more resources" than Iceland. You could have the universities do the analysis of the data and help with planning how to deal with it."ĭespite having far more people, Stefánsson suggested the U.S. "You could have the universities do the testing. ![]() ![]() "You have all of this talent, all of this equipment in your universities, that could simply be drafted to apply to this epidemic," he said. is a vital weapon in the battle against Covid-19. Stefánsson said the strong academic system in the U.S. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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