Biochips to Transform Treatment of
Disease
Source: San Jose Mercury News
December 21, 1999
Coming soon, to a chip near you, your own genes.
The biotechnology industry, which has long lived in the
shadow of Silicon Valley and envied its many overnight successes, is
now tapping into that same technology in a bid to speed up its own
growth significantly.
These biochips look like the integrated circuits in a
personal computer, but instead of containing tiny semiconductors, they
are loaded with bits of actual DNA that make up genes or fragments of
genes. Inserted in a PC-size
analytical instrument, the chips allow scientists to perform thousands
of biochemical experiments at a fraction of the cost and time required
for traditional tests.
``This is a basic tool for change in the laboratory,''
said Michael R. Knapp, vice president for science and technology at
Caliper Technologies in Mountain View. ``We have been operating with
the test-tube paradigm for basically as long as anybody has been doing
anything.''
Biochips, or microarrays, as they are also known, will
bring genomics, the study of all the genes in a living organism, out
of the research laboratory and into the daily practice of medicine. If
genomics delivers on its promise, health care will shift from a focus
on detection and treatment to a process of prediction and prevention.
Fortunes will be made.
The initial market for the biochips has been in drug dis
covery, and the major customers have been the large drug companies. By
analyzing the subtle changes that occur in genes when a cell becomes
cancerous or is infiltrated by a virus, scientists at these companies
search for new molecular targets
for drugs. This needle-in-a-haystack process could take many years
using test tubes and petri dishes but is accelerated a thousandfold by
biochip technology.
The market for biochemical research instruments is in
the billions, and the transformational power of biochips has not gone
unnoticed by the stock market. Shares in Affymetrix, of Santa Clara,
the pioneering company in biochips, have risen more than fivefold the
last year, giving the company a market value of about $3.08 billion.
Other public companies in the field have had similar gains.
Genomics on a desktop
But the biochip makers are now chasing a bigger
opportunity: personal genomics. Even as the public and private efforts
to spell out the 3 billion biochemical letters that make up the human
genetic code race to a conclusion, the biochip companies say they will
bring genomics to an affordable desktop system that could be deployed
in clinics and physicians' offices. Sophisticated genetic analysis
could be performed at the
individual level, making possible early prediction or detection of
disease, more accurate diagnosis and customized therapy.
Originally the province of a handful of start-ups backed
by venture capital and operating in a sort of gray area between
Silicon Valley and the biotech world, the biochip market has lately
attracted the attention of major electronics companies like Motorola,
Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments and
IBM, all of which have chips in development. Motorola's recent
advertisements promote the company's ``digital DNA,'' while those of
Hewlett-Packard proclaim the ``DNA of Silicon Valley.'' The message
may be metaphoric, but the market is very real.
`A big business'
``The biochip space lies at the intersection between
high-technology chip manufacturing, signal processing, software skills
and more traditional molecular biology and genomics,'' said Nick
Naclerio, vice president and general manager for Motorola's biochip
systems division. ``So it seemed
right for Motorola to get involved in what we think will ultimately be
a big business.''
The biochip companies are one of three new industries
that piggybacked on the human genome project, the multinational,
decade-old effort to identify the 100,000 or more genes -- made from
the 3 billion letters or base pairs of nucleotides -- that inform
every aspect of human biology. That
project is expected to be completed within a year or two, either by
the national labs or private companies or, as seems most likely, a
combination of the two.
Genomics companies like Human Genome Sciences,
Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Incyte Pharmaceuticals and the Celera
Genomics Group of PE Corp. rushed to beat the public effort by finding
and patenting genes of medical utility. Bioinformatics companies, like
DoubleTwist.com and Informax, offer software to interpret genomic
data. The chip companies, led by Affymetrix, offer a tool to automate
the arduous lab work of biochemical research -- and maybe to do much
more.
Fodor's paper
``We're going to burn a set of chips with the whole
human genome,'' said Stephen P.A. Fodor, president and chief executive
of Affymetrix. Fodor headed a group that pioneered the field of
biochips, with a 1991 paper in the journal Science describing how
photolithography, the standard
process by which semiconductor companies etch circuits in silicon,
could also be used to synthesize biological materials on a chip.
Companies like Eli Lilly, SmithKline Beecham and
American Home Products have been eagerly buying Affymetrix's GeneChip
arrays, helping to increase the company's revenues in the first nine
months of this year to $65.7 million, from $35.8 million in the
comparable period a year earlier.
Often lost in the excitement about the completion of the
genome project is that the first human genome will be a consensus,
culled from the DNA samples of dozens of anonymous donors. The
sequence of each gene will be arrived at only after billions of
taxpayer dollars and a decade of study in laboratories lined with
$300,000 gene-sequencing machines and other elaborate devices. What
the makers of biochips promise is to offer that same depth of
information at the individual level and at low cost.
``As soon as the reference DNA is out there, this will
move in a thousand different directions,'' Fodor said.
by Lawrence M. Fisher
New York Times
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