U.S. scientist Craig Venter, who succeeded in mapping the human genome in 2000, is now tackling the mystery of age-related diseases.
Earlier this week Venter, 67, announced the formation of Human Longevity, Inc. This company's goal is to sequence 40,000 human genomes a year to search for new age-related disease treatments, including cancer, diabetes and obesity, heart and liver diseases, and dementia. They will also be investigating microbes in the body to better develop probiotics, and biochemical to get a better picture of how chemicals circulate in the body and affect health and drug response.
This potentially revolutionary research may be able to decode the puzzle of age-related diseases that go untreated and lead to a longer, healthier life.
"From your genome, we will know everything about who your ancestors were genetically, what you got from them, your type of memory, your type of fundamental metabolism, even whether you are an optimist or a pessimist," Venter said according to IOL Scitech. "A lot of these things are genetic traits that aren't just nice things to know. They are also predictive of medical outcomes."
Venter, who has teamed up with stem cell pioneer Dr. Robert Hariri and X Prize Foundation founder Dr. Peter Diamandis in this endeavor, need high tech machinery to tackle research in this grand a scale. Human Longevity will use two HiSeq X Ten machines, manufactured by Illumina Inc., that can map a single genome for only $1,000, and has an option to buy three more. Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flately thinks that is a small price to pay, and a necessary one, if we want to one day better understand age-related diseases.
"We've still only scratched the surface of what the genome holds," he told Reuters. "What we need to do now is get hundreds of thousands to millions of genomes in databases with clinical information."
The $70 million startup company will first team up with Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, and start by looking at 4,000 to 5,000 cancer patients a year and sequencing their genomes.
