AstraZeneca is making a bold genomics play that places it at the forefront of the precision medicine game: Company-wide, it’s going to use data insights from a huge swath of genomes to inform the future of its drug development.
“We’ll be researching two million genomes – an unprecedented number that’s necessary because we’ll be looking for rare differences between individuals,” Ruth March, head of personalized healthcare at AstraZeneca, said in a press call. “These differences are what scientists believe underlie diseases like diabetes, asthma and cancer.”
Working with J. Craig Venter’s Human Longevity Inc, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Finland’s Institute for Molecular Medicine, AstraZeneca — and its biologics R&D arm MedImmune — plans to integrate genomics research into every step of drug development.
This includes basic science research to understand the biologic underpinnings of diseases it plans to target. It’ll also use genomics to better inform clinical trial selection, and will deploy pharmacogenomics to target patients that would benefit from its drugs.
The two million genomes aren’t yet in hand, of course – they’ll consist of a million that still being collected by Human Longevity, 500,000 from AstraZeneca’s own research, and another 500,000 should be in the public domain, said David Goldstein, a Columbia University genomics professor chair of AstraZeneca’s genomics advisory board. Tens of thousands are currently in hand, but genome compilation will take place over the course of a decade.
