Complexity Brings Bad Times for Single-Gene Biotech Industry

Geneticists might have been simple, but they weren't dumb.

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a breathless article about new discoveries in genetics:

The $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discovery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded.

Last month, a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function.... To their surprise, researchers found that the human genome might not be a “tidy collection of independent genes” after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.

Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. According to the institute, these findings will challenge scientists “to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do.”

The findings mentioned in the article were those of the ENCODE research consortium, who'd just provided the most comprehensive evidence yet that junk DNAisn't so junky after all.

As we've mentioned, the findings were significant, but not conceptually new. For a while, some scientists have figured that junk DNA was important, and many more are coming round. Likewise, genes are nearly universally seen, at least by scientists, as interconnecting in fantastically subtle and complex ways.

So it wasn't surprising that that Ken Paigen, former director of the
Jackson labs, said of the article that he'd "never heard anything so ridiculous. Of course scientists knew this!"

But as geneticist Neil Risch pointed out, the author of the article was a product of the biotech industry -- an industry that has been largely predicated, in terms of intellectual property and its approach to health, on simplistic models of genes and disease.

When science is revolutionized, scientists can easily adjust. But what about industries? The biotech industry as a whole won't disappear, but it'll certainly need to retool itself -- and their gene patents could form a royal tangle as complex interactions are identified. It's not inconceivable that different genes involved in a disease could belong to dozens of companies.

And there could be more problems:

Even more important than patent laws are safety issues raised by the consortium’s findings. Evidence of a networked genome shatters the scientific basis for virtually every official risk assessment of today’s commercial biotech products, from genetically engineered crops to pharmaceuticals.

“The real worry for us has always been that the commercial agenda for biotech may be premature, based on what we have long known was an incomplete understanding of genetics,” said Professor Heinemann, who writes and teaches extensively on biosafety issues.

That sounds a bit extreme. But complex gene interactions definitely raise some interesting questions about intellectual property and biotech safety. More to come....

A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech [New York Times]

Image: University of Bristol