Talk

I’d say that this year’s stories ran the spectrum from “what’s in our genome?” to “what does it say about us?” to “what should we do with that information?” Yes, here’s science to policy in six easy pieces!

Diabetes Risk Genes Are Confirmed. The body of research behind this discovery is impressive, covering populations around the world and all hitting publication in a very short window of time. (I think Denise Grady, a health journalist at the New York Times captured this best with the context of a personal perspective.) With news about Americans’ skyrocketing diabetes rates, our overweight children, and our heaviest nation status, you’d think this genetic news would have made a bigger splash. Stay tuned in 2007 and let’s see what happens once testing becomes available.

The FDA Recommends Relabeling Tamoxifen - In October, the FDA met to review a compelling body of research that shows 7-10% of people may not receive medical benefit of tamoxifen, because of their 2D6 genes. This is an historic first for pharmacogenetics: it’s the first time FDA has recommended relabelling for the effectiveness of a drug, not just toxicity warnings (e.g. atomoxetine/Strattera for ADHD). It’s also notable that certain SSRIs, particularly Paxil, interfere with the metabolism of tamoxifen just like these genes do - so taking both Paxil and tamoxifen effectively cancels out the benefit of the tamoxifen. Please indulge me as I proudly say that my company is on the ball - we began providing this genetic test to consumers and doctors in October, right after the FDA’s recommendation came out.

The GAO’s Nutrigenomic Sting. In August, the Senate Committee on Aging had a very public hearing on nutrigenomic testing prompted by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO put four nutrigenomic companies on the hot-seat (Sciona, Suracell, Genelex, Market America) confronting them with questions of accuracy and validity, coming just short of accusing them of fraud. Yes, nutrigenomics is very exciting and promising but GAO declared “buyer beware,” the cart is before the horse. Magic pills? Wonder diets? Will we ever learn?

The Genomic X Prize Was Announced. On October 4, the X Prize Foundation, which pioneered the concept of personal spaceflight, announced a $10M award for the team that can develop fast, commercial-scale individual genome sequencing. Bring it on!

Are We Just Monkeys, After All? Last year, the chimp genome was sequenced, which led scientists, bloggers, and your basic guy on the street were up in arms about when and how humans diverged from our closest genetic ancestor, the chimpanzee, and that our genomes had very little variation between them. But just in time for 2006, here’s this week’s news on the human-chimp genome front.

And the news gets better….

Copy Number Variation. It turns out that each of us is special and unique after all!

(The consolation prize goes to Jason and Elissa’s favorite story: The Wet-Dry Earwax Gene.)

With this round-up, I’m off to celebrate the holidays with family and friends. Good tidings to all, and to all a good night!

Technorati Tags: diabetes, genes, risk, genome, x prize, tamoxifen, cyp2d6, genetic test, chimpanzee, copy number variation, dna

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Drug Response, Human Genome, Miscellaneous, Tamoxifen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.