9/1/2023 0 Comments Companies like decode geneticsStefansson and Harper both say that their intent is to leave DeCode as it is, and to continue to allow it to publish its discoveries in scientific journals while giving Amgen access to the people doing the research to help speed its drug discovery efforts. company would now control Icelandic genetic samples. On Twitter, Albert Vernon Smith, a geneticist at the University of Iceland, wrote that there was unhappiness that a U.S. We have been struggling to discover drugs and diagnostics.” He said that he felt “privileged” that he will continue to run DeCode as a direct subsidiary of Amgen and that he hoped the larger company’s scale would protect DeCode from the vagaries of the market. “We have been struggling in the applied aspect of this. ![]() “I am convinced we are the most productive genetics discovery operation in the world,” said Stefansson in a telephone interview this morning. ![]() Still, though, making use of those discoveries was hard. The second DeCode has become a research powerhouse using a population genetics platform, making major discoveries about the genetics of Alzheimer’s and autism. It has since re-emerged, with new funding as a new company with the same name. In 2009, facing rising debts and a stock price that had fallen from its $18 IPO price to just 23 cents, it declared bankruptcy. At one point it was testing its own drug against cardiovascular disease.īut, in a classic biotechnology story, DeCode had trouble turning its science into a business. In 2000, it sported a market capitalization of $1.2 billion. Decode flew out of the box with a $200 million drug-finding collaboration with Roche. Founder, Kari Stefansson, a Harvard geneticist with the bearing of a Viking, sealed up a deal to use Iceland’s genealogical records to discover new genes. “That kind of information coming directly from humans is extremely compelling for people like me to have to make decisions,” says Harper.ĭeCode was a hot company from the moment it was founded in 1996. In a Nature paper, DeCode showed that mutations in a popular Alzheimer’s drug target called BACE could protect against the disease, and also against the normal loss of acuity that comes with aging. Harper says that DeCode’s work in Alzheimer’s is an example of how he would like to use the company’s technology. Sclerostin, a project Amgen is working on with UCB Pharma, is a similar but more under-the-radar story. The idea is that genetics can start to prove a drug will work before there is even a drug. Mutations that turn up the volume on the gene result in high cholesterol and larger risk of heart attacks those that make it stop working lower cholesterol and lifetime cholesterol risk. Researchers at several drug companies, including Sanofi, Pfizer and Merck as well as Amgen, have pointed to PCSK9 as their new ideal of a drug target. ![]() “Having that information that those targets are relevant in human disease as opposed to not having it and relying on animal models is a huge thing for us given that we can only explore a small number of drug targets in any given time.” “It was really working on targets like PCSK9 or our sclerostin program which are the two biggest assets in our pipeline that really drove home the immense value of having targets that have either been discovered or validated by the kind of human genetic analysis that Decode is a world expert in,” Harper says.
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