SNP Consortium Announced

Ten of the world's biggest drug makers and five leading scientific laboratories recently announced a new consortium to map single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), heritable sequence variations believed to underlie differences in predisposition to common diseases such as Alzeimer's disease and cancer. The group—which includes AstraZeneca (London), Bayer (Pittsburgh, PA), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (New York), F. Hoffmann-La Roche (Nutley, NJ), Glaxo Wellcome (Research Triangle Park, NC), Hoechst Marion Roussel (Kansas City, MO), Novartis (Basle, Switzerland), Pfizer (New York), Searle (Skokie, IL), and SmithKline Beecham (Philadelphia)—is designed to speed the development and delivery of safer and more effective drugs.

Academic institutions in the consortium are Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (Cambridge, MA), Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis, MO), the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Centre (Cambridge, UK), Stanford Human Genome Center (Palo Alto, CA), and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY).

With support from the Wellcome Trust (London), a leading British foundation, the consortium will spend $45 million over the next two years in their quest to identify 300,000 new SNPs. Currently there are some 4,000 SNPs recorded in the SNP database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. To further speed research by others, the consortium plans to keep the data in the public domain with monthly postings on the Internet.

The SNP Consortium is a non-profit entity governed by a board composed of representatives of the member organizations with an independent chairman. The consortium participants will provide oversight and technical expertise to the scientific plan, and direct the effort to ensure public availability of SNPs that are generated.

Once identified, SNPs can then be used in association studies, in which SNP patterns from a target population—such as patients who suffer from a particular disease or who respond in a certain way to a drug—are compared with SNP patterns from unaffected populations to find genetic variations shared only by the affected group. These associations are expected to accelerate the identification of disease-specific genes, and allow for the development of novel, even tailor-made therapeutics.

"A large, high-density and high-quality SNP map will be of great utility to the medical research community, as it will help answer questions about genetic factors that contribute to disease susceptibility and response to treatment, and suggest directions for future investigation," says Arthur Holden, chairman and CEO of the SNP Consortium. "The members of the consortium believe that free and unrestricted access to this powerful tool will benefit scientific inquiry in industry, government, academic, and independent laboratories."

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are enthusiastic about the new endeavor. The NIH is slated to spend over $30 million in similar efforts. "We're elated," said Kathy Hudson, assistant director at the National Human Genome Research Institute (Bethesda, MD). "Their effort will complement the work we're doing. And the more data, the better, because we need to find the root of disease."

However, not all researchers in the field were excited by the news. J. Craig Venter, head of Celera Genomics Corp. (Rockville, MD), which has set its sites on identifying "millions" of genetic variations, called the consortium a "relatively minor research project."

For more information, contact the Wellcome Trust Press Office, The Wellcome Building, 183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE, UK, +44-171-611-8612.