BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - The UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) is pooling resources with GlaxoSmithKline plc in a £2 million (US$2.96 million) program to identify and validate genes associated with common human diseases and then translate the findings into drug targets and biomarkers.

The partners said the three-year program will pilot a new way of collaboration between the two organizations, bringing together academic and industrial expertise and resources, and sharing of large databases and sample collections. As part of the effort, GSK will make data acquired from large disease-related and population-based genetic studies available.

Patrick Vallance, senior vice president of drug discovery at GSK said the genetics of human diseases has come of age and the company wants to make the most of current knowledge to develop new drugs. "We have worked hard to collect and refine our data, but we now need to take a bold step forward and work with others to uncover the new disease targets and genetic variations."

Vallance added, "We hope other industry groups will see the power of pooling knowledge in this way and consider how they, too, can work productively with academic partners."

On GSK's side, the project will be led by Lon Cardon, who was recruited by the London-based company last week to head its Genetics organization, with a brief to combine pharmacogenetics and medical genetics into a single, integrated function. Cardon came from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, where he was co-director of the Herbold Computational Biology Program, and from the University of Washington, where he was professor of biostatistics.

Vallance said that while a number of genetic variants have been identified, which are related to common diseases, the challenge now is to integrate those into drug discovery and development to, "determine whether common genetic variants can meaningfully impact how we should use medicines to optimize benefit and reduce risk."

The program will be managed by a joint MRC-GSK steering group. Kicking off the partnership, two awards were announced. The first will look at the genetics of depression, aiming to identify genes involved in susceptibility to depression by combining very large samples of thousands of white European subjects with well-characterized depressive illness. The second will look for genetic variants associated with obesity and related metabolic disorders.

Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said, "Collaborating to produce larger cohorts and hence more statistically significant results, will allow us to identify genetic and other contributors to disease more quickly."