Duke/TCAG collaboration

[gonflable]

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Is anyone else excited about this development? Hunt Willard's mission statements read almost like a paraphrase of some of my MSTP essays-- I mean this is EXACTLY the "future" I have been thinking about for a couple of years. I had no idea this was going down at Duke, but it has made me even happier with my decision to do my MSTP there. Any thoughts on the 1st genetic medicine initiative?

 

[MacGyver]

much ado about nothing...

every med school in the country is doing this kind of genetics research... Duke is just turning it into a marketing campaign for Joe Blow on the street who doesnt really understand genetics and might go to Duke now for genetic screening.

Purely a money/marketing ploy to the general public.

 

[Doctor&Geek]

I have reservations about a foundation bankrolled on Ventner/Celera money.

 

[mjs]

Like him or not, Venter's got guts, access to a huge sequencing facility and more money than any academic scientist. So in fact, there's way more $$$ behind this one than other programs. Also, this is a not-for-profit organization. He chose to collaborate with Duke, which introduces a generation of young academically inclined physicians to genomics- a big move.

The one thing you can't take for granted about Venter is how fiercely he competes. He's just upped the ante for the translation of genomic information into medically relevant results. I say the more weight that is thrown at the problem, the faster it gets solved, so this is really exciting.

 

[gonflable]

The $$$ is the difference here. One thing I wonder about is how they intend to use their findings. Considering that they will be studying an existing population of Duke patients, who will pay for the "personalized medicine" that should eventually arise from their research. In genotyping, association, and molecular analysis, institutional research funding will be available, but won't someone else have to pay for any actual medical care?

 

[MPS]

Originally posted by mjs
Like him or not, Venter's got guts, access to a huge sequencing facility and more money than any academic scientist. So in fact, there's way more $$$ behind this one than other programs. Also, this is a not-for-profit organization. He chose to collaborate with Duke, which introduces a generation of young academically inclined physicians to genomics- a big move.

The one thing you can't take for granted about Venter is how fiercely he competes. He's just upped the ante for the translation of genomic information into medically relevant results. I say the more weight that is thrown at the problem, the faster it gets solved, so this is really exciting.

Vetner does have a lot of get up and go, however I think that his push for progress has (in some respects) been at the expense of accuracy. The Celera shot-gun sequencing strategy is pretty sloppy. Still, I can't see this collaboration being at all bad for Duke.

 

[gonflable]

You know, the sequencing approach wasn't Celera's big problem: their unbelievably crappy genome browser interface was. We purchased a subscription to the Celera genome as soon as it was available, yet very few months later, most of the lab had come to rely on Ensembl and then UCSC browsers. While some of the Celera assembly did have problems, it did fill some gaps that the public sequence left open. And vice versa, of course.

I still can't believe that interface...

 

[mjs]

I've read the PNAS papers criticizing the assembly and Celera's response. I'm certainly not in a position to say much about the implications of these results in a nitty gritty sense, but in my "big picture" I don't think it's about which assembly is best. I'm simply excited by the way competition has pushed everything along faster than it would've gone otherwise.

Though I think the three of us in the last few posts all agree that this is good news for Duke. Had I known this was gonna happen I would've applied there 😉.