Drug company releases type 2 diabetes genomic information

Posted on March 27, 2007
Filed Under Science |

As genomic information piles up at an exponential rate, sorting through it all has become overwhelming. In the hopes that with enough eyes, breakthroughs will materialize, the Swiss drug company Novartis has helped create a free and open database on the genetics of type 2 diabetes. Posted at
www.broad.mit.edu/diabetes, the Diabetes Genetics Initiative is a collaboration between Novartis, the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, and Lund University in Sweden. Launched in 2004 and completed recently, it contains information on the genomes of 1500 people with diabetes and 1500 without in Sweden and Finland.

Alan Shuldiner, an endocrinologist and geneticist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, suspects that the Novartis collaboration is “proactively providing their data in anticipation that others will do the same.” A dozen teams are working along the same lines with different populations, from the Pima Indians in Arizona to Massachusetts residents in the Framingham Heart Study.

Source: Science magazine

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