GeneOS' database shows how genes affect diagnostics
GeneOS is building databases that combine comprehensive medical records and biological samples, which should show how individual genetic differences affect a patient's medical outcome.
GeneOS is building databases that combine comprehensive medical records and biological samples, which should show how individual genetic differences affect a patient's medical outcome.
The aim is to speed up the development of new therapies and diagnostics, for example by aiding recruitment for clinical trials, and through biomarker discovery and validation.
The current focus is on common chronic diseases that affect a significant proportion of the population, notably asthma, COPD, cardiovascular disease, cancer, central nervous system disorders and Type II diabetes. What makes GeneOS unique is that as well as hunting biomarkers, it is taking a pharmacoeconomic approach, and licensing the health economic factors too.
It has already had some success, with the discovery of an orphan G-protein receptor, GPRA, which is involved in the pathogenesis of asthma, and could also be implicated in other inflammatory diseases. It was pinpointed by a genome-wide scan of 250 Finnish families, and the results were replicated in Canadian families.
'You never know what kind of genes you will find when you start a study,' says the company's chief scientific officer Tarja Laitinin. 'They may not be druggable. We were lucky. We know something about GPRA's function; it is expressed in the bronchial endothelium, and is present in the smooth cell muscle layer in the bronchi.'
The gene is also associated with atopic conditions in general - including eczema, rhinitis and airway allergies, as well as asthma. 'Two of the most common variants are not risk variants, and others can vary from one patient to the next,' she says. 'I am sure the environment also has some effect, and hopefully with a large cohort of thousands of patients we will be able to find out more.'
The technique is essentially a biobank process, but with one big advantage - it uses retrospective data. As record keeping in the Finnish healthcare system is so good, these historical data mean they have a head start of several years, rather than having to start from scratch.