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The power of a billion: India’s genomics revolution
India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality – and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world’s population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases. In a similar vein, 81% of the world’s genomic information has been collected from people with European ancestry.
At the same time, there’s a growing interest in developing new, more effective therapies tailored to an individual’s genetic make up – an idea known as precision or personalised medicine. Missing out on mapping worldwide genetic diversity is a big mistake, according to Sumit Jamuar, chief executive of Global Gene Corp. It’s a company aiming to democratise healthcare by capturing anonymised genetic data from populations around the world and share it with the global community of academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. It will start by focusing on populations in South Asia.
“Healthcare is broken,” Mr Jamuar says. “We spend $1 trillion on drugs every year, of which 40% or more are deemed to be ineffective. We realised that with the power and possibility of genomics and precision medicine, you can change the health outcome for any individual and allow them to have not just a longer but a better quality of life. What was lacking was genomic data to realise that promise, and that’s what we’ve set out to achieve.”
As deaths from infectious diseases fall, particularly in the developing world, there’s a rise in chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes – something the World Health Organization has described as a “slow-motion catastrophe”. Treatments for these conditions are moving away from “one size fits all”, becoming more precisely targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup. Yet these drugs are currently designed and tested on the basis of predominantly “pale and male” genomic information, and may not work for people with regional variations in their DNA.
Mr Jamuar believes the key to fixing this problem lies in gathering genetic data - as much of it as possible – along with harnessing the technical tools to analyse and share it. “If we take the example of GPS technology, it used to just provide longitude and latitude. Now we have Google maps and that has changed everything,” he explains. “It allows us not to focus on what goes on underneath the technology, but how we can use it to navigate our way round the world. What we want to do is create a high-fidelity genomic map of the world. And instead of looking for things like restaurants or traffic in a city, we can look at mutations or diseases in different areas.”
(Kat Arney. www.bbc.com, 22.06.2017. Adaptado.)
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