Despite understandably varied opinions on the US federal government, I think that most of us can agree that U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) has done remarkable things for the world and life sciences. They are the world driver and biggest supporter of genetic research, they largely funded the $3B Human Genome Project, and they continue to provide investment of about $5B per year toward fundamentally improving life science through genetics. All told, this leadership has placed us at the precipice of major progress in molecular-based personalized medicine.
As with the Internet, it was many people who “invented” it, but, in the case of genomics, it’s clearly been the NIH that’s provided inspirational, institutional, and financial stewardship.
Which leaves us in life science with a fundamental responsibility – to leverage these investments throughout the industry.
An opportunity here is the 1000 Genomes Project — the first project to sequence the genomes of a large number of people and provide a comprehensive, free resource on human genetic variation. It’s an amazing, emerging resource and, in my opinion, the life science industry should enable every research and clinical health organization to fully leverage this $50M investment. It’s also a leading indicator of more studies already underway and surely more to come.
At GenomeQuest, we’ve put much thought and research into this and, last week, announced GQ-PMR (personalized medicine research). You can find out more about it here. For this post, I’ll just say that we hope to help activate this public data for day-to-day use in pharma research and accelerate their transition to personalized medicine. And all done so standing on the shoulders of the NIH.