If the development efforts of this technology are successful, Roche will be able to accelerate its plans to develop drugs that focus on defined groups of patients, in the format of personalized medicine.
Roche will finance the technological research that will be carried out by IBM and will provide the project with additional resources available in its subsidiary that deals with genetic mapping. Roche will develop and market all products based on this new technology.
The technology that Roche will use is based on a unique IBM transistor, which allows the gene sequence to be mapped at the single molecule level, through the transfer of DNA through a tiny slit in the silicon body, the size of which is one millionth of a mm (a single nanometer). After the technology is fully developed, in a process that is expected to last several years, the price of deciphering a certain person's set of genes will drop to only 100-1,000 dollars - compared to tens of thousands of dollars today.
If the development efforts of this technology are successful, Roche will be able to accelerate its plans to develop drugs that focus on defined groups of patients, in the form of personalized medicine. Fast and reliable decoding of DNA sequences will help Roche identify patients who respond better to specific drugs, reduce side effects and lower the development costs of new drugs.
Roche already markets drugs designed for patients with a defined genetic profile. Thus, for example, the company offers a diagnostic kit that measures the growth of certain breast cancer cells - and identifies the patients who are expected to respond well to Herceptin treatment. Last year, Roche sold Herceptin for 5 billion Swiss francs.
However, the director of the computational biology department at the IBM research laboratories, Ajay Royoro, points out that the development process of the new technology may continue for years. After IBM has already developed a technology for transferring the DNA through the silicon chip, additional intensive research efforts will now be required in order to control the rate of this transfer, in a way that will allow accurate identification of the gene sequence.
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nucleus:
The words you wrote only strengthened my impression that you are wrong.
I come from the computer field and I am well aware of the efforts that have always been made and are still being made to improve our ability to process data.
Some of the patents I registered are exactly in these areas.
Do you understand? There are people who know what needs to be done and they do it and there are people who only know how to write big words and hope that it will convince (without even knowing what they want to convince).
Michael,
My friends call me Keren, I expect you to call me Mr. Afula. or sir or both.
In any case, the analysis technology comes above the collection technology layer. Collection technology has evolved dramatically over the past decade. The price and time for sequencing a single nucleotide are usually the methods to measure the development of the field and the improvement has been exponential for a long time since the days of the "Human Genome Project" (which is really only a single decade). And that's without talking about the breakthroughs in RNAI, protein sequencing, and understanding the role of epigenetics. That means both the pure science soared and the ability to collect. This brought us to the point that today a discussion about data analysis is not far-fetched but still futuristic. And this is the time for the entrepreneurs to succeed in getting ahead of the big companies on the one hand, and on the other hand to succeed in raising capital.
I hope that the big words I wrote in the message made an impression on you and gave you the feeling that I am right and you are wrong. Otherwise why am I doing it? What's the point of a tickbook if it doesn't convince anyone?
nucleus:
It's really not clear to me how it is possible to start today something that was already started more than a decade ago.
If you have an idea for a startup - go and set it up.
If you don't have such an idea, you're just talking dumb.
Michael,
I don't think it's that simple. We are talking about 3 billion bases per person, and to that we need to add layers of RNAI, proteins, and possibly epigenetic data such as methylation, etc. The complexity of the analysis here is significant compared to standard processing methods, but the real challenge here is the stage of presenting the image to technological laymen - that is, systems of this level of complexity usually do not give results that should be readily available to a doctor but to a system expert. It sounds like a small difference, but in my opinion it is huge.
I agree with Ami. If science will allow in 3 years full flooring for every western person - the Israeli start-ups should start cheering now.
Ami:
Methods for the rapid processing of huge amounts of information have been at the heart of the pursuits and researches of computer people for many years and will certainly be at the heart of being there.
In other words - constantly investing in it.
Even in the specific field of extracting information from the genome, a lot of work has been done (and actually decoding the genome is only part of this work).
In other words: what exactly do you mean?
With this confrontation, I am sure that they will succeed bravely and know how to produce at a price "worth every soul" (or translated to reality: for the white man in the Western world) technologies of deciphering a personal genome and all this will happen within a few years. Until then, it must be understood that in a few years we will be facing enormous libraries of information and these will continue to flow in unprecedented quantities. All this information and its correct assessment will have to be dealt with in the near future - and for this it seems that there are currently no smart enough tools. This development should be done at the same time, even though the product does not yet exist. You have to anticipate the future confrontation and also invest in the aspect of processing the information - because as it seems it is going to be the bottleneck.
Greetings friends,
Ami Bachar