not I the current financial crisis, but the boom and subsequent crash of the biotech industry at the end of the 90s. Keith Robinson has witnessed first hand at one of the former biotech company Millennium Pharmaceuticals , and has a few days ago on Omics! Omics! indulged in a little memories.
Of course, if you have a mountain of loot you probably want to protect it. Enter the lawyers. Millennium had always filed on their discoveries; protect now they had lots of discoveries to. But protect from what? Well, the paranoia was a loss of "Freedom to Operate", usually known as FTO. Nobody knew what would stand up as a patent -- but there were instructive examples from the early biotech era of business plans sunk by a loss of FTO -- and expensive lawsuits that clearly marked that loss. So the patenting engine took off -- an expensive insurance policy against an unpredictable future.
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This was the late 90's and the hype was getting thick -- we were guilty but so were others. Millennium wasn't a big pusher of high gene counts -- at least in the terms of the day (but that's another whole story), but certainly we started selling all those genes we had & the ones we extrapolated were still out there. A key part of the business model was to sell the genes many times - if we could sell the same gene to Lilly for cardiovascular and metabolic for Roche and AstraZeneca for inflammation, all the better. Not that anything underhanded went on, we'd present the case to each company and most of the deals had exclusivity only within a therapeutic area.
to the point with the numbers of genes is he eingeganen detail in another post . Whence came the incredibly large numbers in the estimates of how many genes in the human genome are associated with, at one time was before the human genome sequence published? 50 000 100 000, or maybe even 200 000? Probably mainly competition. If the biotech companies A and B want to compile with both bioinformatics and hard work to the sequencers databases with human genes and sell them, to pharmaceutical companies about which database is then bought more? As long as you can only rely on rough estimates precaution that twice as many genes. So that has rocked slowly then up to a very lofty heights. Own fault if everybody cooperates. Was more sobering for the customer then the result of the Human Genome Project: about 25000-30000 genes in recent years, rather then shrunk to 22000-23000.
This is not to say that not a few people had already thought about this in the nineties:
So my colleague tried a new approach, which I think was to say: we have a few percent of the human genome sequences (albeit mostly around genes of interest and not randomly sampled). How many genes have been found? And what would that extrapolate out to for the whole genome.
His conclusion was so shocking I admit I refused to believe it at first, and never quite bought into it. I think it was about 25-30K. How could the textbooks be off by 2X-3X? I could believe the other genomics companies might be optimistic in interpreting their data, but could they really be deluding themselves that much??
But, the logic was hard to assault. In order for his estimate to be low by a lot, you would have to posit that the genomic regions sequenced to date were generated unusually poor - and that the rest of the genome was packed.
Both articles are worth reading, and hence quite interesting because you hear about the young age of genomics usually only from the side of academic research.
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