At the start of this year, it signed a deal with IBM to offer data mining technology to medical research customers. Since its establishment in 1996, deCODE has isolated 15 disease genes and struck up collaborations with several major pharmaceutical companies. Whatever the source, it is vital if he is to convince shareholders of the company’s stability and potential success. Perhaps Stefansson’s confidence emanates from his Viking roots - he can trace his family back to an ancestor born in 910 on the west coast of Iceland. ![]() We aim to start Phase II clinical trials before the end of this year with a compound that we have licensed from Bayer that has already been shown to be safe in humans.” The most advanced program is for myocardial infarction, where we isolated a gene that makes a protein that has been used as a target for drug development in other diseases. We have a drug development program based on our isolation of a gene in schizophrenia. Stefansson elaborates: “We’re working in collaboration with Hoffman La Roche to develop stroke drugs on the basis of our phosphodiesterase 4D gene finding. “We have verified this finding in a Danish population and also in an American population, which we hope will be published soon,” Stefansson tells the JCI, adding, “We expect to have a diagnostic test on the market for osteoporosis next year.”ĭeCODE is also working to find drugs that target the genes uncovered by its population genetics research. Hence, researchers have thus been able to scour the genomes of 705 people with osteoporosis, identifying variants of the bone morphogenetic protein–2 gene as resulting in a high susceptibility to osteoporosis. The company has now genotyped 110,000 Icelanders, almost half of the population, and these people have given written consent for use of the data in a range of disease studies. Detailed information on the ancestry of the highly homogeneous inhabitants of Iceland led to a linkage analysis that focused on the short arm of chromosome 20, a region known to contain genes involved in bone formation. The finding was the result of a three-year study that began with deCODE’s mining of an extraordinary resource - a genealogical database of Icelanders stretching back 1,100 years. As Stefansson had hoped when he quit his tenured post at Harvard to set up the company, mining the DNA of the population of Iceland for disease genes is paying off.ĭeCODE’s latest discovery, reported in November, is a new genetic risk factor for osteoporosis. ![]() deCODE also hopes to publish findings of an additional 11 disease genes in the coming months and aims to break into the diagnostics market next year with a test for an osteoporosis susceptibility gene. In recent months, deCODE Genetics has announced the discovery of genes which, when mutated, increase the chances of stroke and myocardial infarction.
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