LONDON - The Wellcome Trust is to put #10 million (US$16.5 million) into a UK project to identify all cancer genes, and said all the information will be put in the public domain.

The Cancer Genome Project will be led by Michael Stratton and Richard Wooster of the Institute of Cancer in London, who discovered the breast cancer gene BRCA2, and will be based at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, which has a leading role in the Human Genome Project (HGP).

The cancer project will provide one of the first, and a very striking example, of the role that the sequence data from the HGP will play in understanding disease. The project will involve comparing the "normal" sequences generated by the HGP against DNA sequences from tumors, using high-throughput mutation detection techniques to identify the abnormal genes.

"This award from the Wellcome Trust will enable us to develop approaches which will allow systematic examination of the whole genome in large numbers of cancers and thus detect as many of the abnormal genes as possible," Stratton said. "Ultimately, identification of these genes will highlight the weak points in cancer cells with which we can interfere and treat the disease."

At present, it is impossible to pinpoint the genomic location of many cancer-associated genes and often only large, poorly defined areas on the gene map can be identified as having a link with the disease.

It is not clear how long the project will take, but the #10 million will support it for five years.

The move to systematically uncover all cancer genes and put them in the public domain could undermine commercial genomics companies that are adopting a variety of approaches to find genes. Paul Kelly, CEO of Gemini Holdings, which specializes in using twins data to identify genes, told BioWorld International, "Every effort to identify genes is welcome, and every effort, whether public or private, should be applauded.

"We are in a race to secure intellectual property, but I don't think such public projects will jeopardize our aims. What is being released is raw sequence information and polymorphisms, and this is unlikely to be patentable, especially in Europe - you need to have functionality and application.

"For a company like Gemini the availability of such data presents a great opportunity because we bring public domain information in house and mine it," Kelly said.

The cancer project is a natural progression of the Wellcome Trust's substantial investment in genomics, according to its director, Michael Dexter. "With completion of the Human Genome Project scheduled for 2003, we want to ensure that research is directed into exploiting genomic data to maximize potential benefits for the future of healthcare."

Through the Sanger Centre the Wellcome Trust has funded one-third of the HGP. It has led the battle to ensure that all sequence data is in the public domain and has argued that genes should not be patented.

The Wellcome Trust has a longstanding policy of not funding cancer research but said this award does not breach the policy because it is "exploring fundamental biological questions."

Additional support for the Cancer Genome Project will come from the Institute of Cancer Research, The Cancer Research Campaign, Breakthrough Breast Cancer and the Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Trust.