By Matthew Willett

SAN DIEGO ¿ Pharmacogenomics, touted as perhaps the biggest revolution in drug discovery to come out of genomics, is likely to find applications across the board in drug development, said Arthur Holden, chairman of the SNP Consortium.

Orchid BioSciences, of Princeton, N.J., disclosed the delivery to collaborators at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory of the largest public set of single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, frequency data generated from the consortium¿s database.

The $45 million nonprofit consortium, begun two years ago by UK-based Wellcome Trust and 10 pharmaceutical companies, was established to construct a map of SNPs that will be freely available to all. (See BioWorld Today, April 16, 1999.)

¿It¿s difficult to imagine an environment where medicine developers don¿t use [pharmacogenomics],¿ Holden said Monday at the BIO 2001 International Biotechnology Convention & Exhibition.

Holden introduced a panel called ¿Strategies in Pharmacogenomics,¿ which included Toni Schuh, president and CEO of Sequenom Inc., of San Diego; Nick Dracopoli, executive director of pharmacogenomics and human genetics at Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute, of Wallingford, Conn.; Doug Dolginow, senior vice president of pharmacogenomics at Gene Logic Inc., of Gaithersburg, Md.; and Rowan Chapman, director of business development at Kirkland, Wash.-based Rosetta Inpharmatics Corp.

Only about 0.1 percent of the human genome¿s base pairs differ between individuals. It¿s those differences that lead to individual differences between people. ¿It¿s progressing very nicely,¿ Holden told BioWorld Today, calling the work to determine the frequency of particular SNPs in the general population ¿incredibly important.¿

Orchid¿s senior vice president and general manager of its life science group, Jack Ball, told BioWorld Today the delivery of the first 10,000 SNP analyses will be followed quickly by the remainder.

¿We should complete the project at the end of this year,¿ he said. ¿This year, we can put in the public domain the allele frequencies for as many of the 60,000 SNPs as we¿re able to generate allele frequency data on.¿

Holden added that the SNP Consortium will phase itself out ¿very elegantly¿ at the end of the year when the mapping is done. ¿Its role is to complete the map, and we¿ll get that done in two to three months and characterize all the frequencies by the end of the year,¿ he said.

Dracopoli told attendees of the panel that pharmacogenomics will add to the way medicine classifies disease when scientists can point to genetic markers in addition to the customary way of distinguishing diseases, especially cancer, by the types of tissue involved.

¿What you¿re going to see is a molecular classification laid on top of the standard classification,¿ he said, allowing for the optimal treatment right away, so that the patient need not endure a sequence of attempts.

Once work, such as SNP allele frequency data, has identified classes of subset responders ¿ that is, those genetically predisposed to react favorably to treatments ¿ trial costs can, in some instances, be reduced, Dracopoli noted.

The need for tools for genetic analysis was the focus of Schuh¿s presentation. His company¿s MassARRAY system, he said, has ¿probably, the highest accuracy in history.¿ As much as 10 percent of the total population could benefit from personalized medicine, he said, adding that ¿we want to have tailor-made drugs that fit as many as possible.¿

Rosetta¿s Chapman told the audience her company will be wrestling with other concerns in pharmacogenomics, as well. ¿The issues we¿re facing are really about privacy and patient consent,¿ she said.

Merck & Co., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., said in May it will acquire Rosetta in a stock buyout valued at about $620 million. (See BioWorld Today, May 14, 2001.)