Reports Tout Return on NIH's Investment
13/05/11 05:28 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 05/13/2011 - 05:28.
With the NIH facing reduced funding, these new reports are indeed well timed. The report produced by Battelle Technology Partnership Practice and largely funded by Life Technologies, a major beneficiary of genomics research funding, makes rather far reaching extrapolations about the economic benefits from the direct investment of the NIH in the Human Genome Project (HGP). It seems that the HGP is to be credited for most of the advancements in biomedical research and the growth of the biotechnology industry in the last two decades.
The reality is that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects made major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the industry to date. This was largely before the HGP officially even started. After a decade since completion of the sequencing of the human genome, it still appears that more than 97% of it has yet to be shown to play any discernible functional role. We can sequence DNA much faster and cheaper than ever before, but our knowledge of the proteins encoded by the human genome continues to grow at a snail pace. Interestingly, in the entire 68 page Battelle Report, the word "proteomics" appears twice and "protein" only appears 23 times.
The Battelle Report bravely espouses all of the wonderful practical benefits that will arise from the HGP, but these outcomes have yet to really materialize. Such pronouncements were also made a decade ago when the human genome was initially sequenced. While a colossal amount of private and government sector money has fueled the growth biotechnology industry and employed a lot of people, the recent trend has been contraction rather than expansion due the poor economic returns so far.
Link to the original blog post.
With the NIH facing reduced funding, these new reports are indeed well timed. The report produced by Battelle Technology Partnership Practice and largely funded by Life Technologies, a major beneficiary of genomics research funding, makes rather far reaching extrapolations about the economic benefits from the direct investment of the NIH in the Human Genome Project (HGP). It seems that the HGP is to be credited for most of the advancements in biomedical research and the growth of the biotechnology industry in the last two decades.
The reality is that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects made major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the industry to date. This was largely before the HGP officially even started. After a decade since completion of the sequencing of the human genome, it still appears that more than 97% of it has yet to be shown to play any discernible functional role. We can sequence DNA much faster and cheaper than ever before, but our knowledge of the proteins encoded by the human genome continues to grow at a snail pace. Interestingly, in the entire 68 page Battelle Report, the word "proteomics" appears twice and "protein" only appears 23 times.
The Battelle Report bravely espouses all of the wonderful practical benefits that will arise from the HGP, but these outcomes have yet to really materialize. Such pronouncements were also made a decade ago when the human genome was initially sequenced. While a colossal amount of private and government sector money has fueled the growth biotechnology industry and employed a lot of people, the recent trend has been contraction rather than expansion due the poor economic returns so far.
Link to the original blog post.