By Kim Coghill

Washington Editor

WASHINGTON - The race to sequence the human genome ended in a dead heat Monday when scientists from two camps announced publication of similar findings in competing journals.

"As much as you love controversy and when we don't get along, there is no competition here," J. Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Rockville, Md.-based Celera Genomics, said during a press conference here. "We have virtually the same information and conclusions."

Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, agreed, saying there are a "great deal of similarities in the research and the outcomes are close to each other."

Celera's work will be published in Science this week while Collins' public effort will be in Nature.

The press conference to simultaneously announce publication of the papers is the outgrowth of an agreement made last summer at the White House. It was last June when the two scientists stood on either side of President Bill Clinton and said they had completed breakthrough work on the human genome. (See BioWorld Today, June 27, 2000.)

The completed sequence is expected to promote medical advances such as diagnostic tests, pharmaceuticals that reflect individual genetic variations, and perhaps gene therapies targeting segments of genetic code responsible for disease.

Diagnostics, Preventive Care Coming Next

Venter's group said that human health, behavior and characteristics are influenced by many factors, and that genetic information must be used wisely.

"With publication of the human DNA sequence, researchers worldwide now have access to the most accurate information in history for developing new diagnostics, treatments and cures for illnesses such as heart disease, various cancers, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and AIDS," Carl Feldbaum, president of Washington-based Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), said in a prepared statement. "The full DNA sequence opens up all the cells and tissues of the body to analysis of how they develop, react to the environment and falter in response to diseases. With this data, researchers can move from the 20th century practice of trial and error experimentation for finding effective therapies to a new era of precision in drug design based on known molecular targets."

Collins said because of the advances announced by his and Venter's teams, within five to seven years physicians will be able to provide patients with early individual medical preventive care for many of the common diseases.

In attendance at Monday's press conference, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who is credited with getting Congress and the White House behind the project, said, "This could be a process whereby every disease known to mankind is understood. I didn't say cured, I said understood - eventually, maybe cured."

When Domenici initially took the project under his wing in the mid-1980s, he named it the "Greatest Wellness Project in Mankind's History."

"The human genome took people a while to understand," Domenici said. "This project was driven by Congress. It was three to four years before the executive branch got involved in this."

The total cost for Phase One (the "working draft") is about $300 million worldwide, with roughly half being funding by the NIH. The government project is sometimes reported to have cost $3 billion. However, this figure refers to the total projected funding over a 15-year period (1990-2005), according to a statement released by Nature and the NIH.

Venter's team will publish in Science Friday a human genome sequence estimated to have an average accuracy of 99.96 percent and color-coded to propose functions for two-thirds of all identified genes. The work reveals an ancient script that's common across all ethnic groups and less than three times as large as a fruit fly's genetic blueprint.

Covering 95 percent of the genome, the sequence sets the total number of human genes somewhere between 26,383 and 39,114. Some researchers had predicted up to 140,000 genes in the human genome.

The government project, which will appear in the Thursday issue of Nature, is a draft sequence covering more than 90 percent of the human genome. It represents the exact order of DNA's four chemical bases, commonly abbreviated as A, T, C and G, along the human chromosomes. This DNA text influences everything from eye color and height, to aging and disease.

The sequence information from the government project has been immediately and freely released to the world with no restrictions on its use or redistribution. The information is scanned daily by scientists in academia and industry as well as by commercial database companies, providing key information services to biotechnologists. Already, many tens of thousands of genes have been identified from the genome sequence, including more than 30 that play a direct role in human disease.

Gaps Still Left To Be Filled

The government's ultimate goal is to produce a completely finished sequence with no gaps and 99.99 percent accuracy. Although the near-finished version is adequate for most biomedical research, project leaders made a commitment to filling all gaps and resolving all ambiguities in the sequence by 2003.

Production of genome sequence has skyrocketed over the past year, with more than 90 percent of the sequence having been produced in the past 15 months alone. Because of this increased capacity, the next phase is expected to move much more rapidly than previously expected. The Human Genome Project also plans to sequence the genomes of many other species, because comparing genomes across species will provide researchers key tools for understanding the essential elements that evolution has designated as important to survival.

Celera and the NIH will participate in a conference in April to review all the data.

Celera's stock (NYSE:CRA) closed Monday at $47.75, up $6.15, or nearly 15 percent. n