Tokyo

A Taiwanese company last week turned the spotlight on Asian genetic variability when it opened its laboratories in Taipei.

Vita Genomics was formed last year to mine the mass of public and private genetic data in an effort to trace genes among the Asian population that are linked to specific diseases.

Researchers elsewhere in east Asia hope that the company's work will encourage the various governments to increase their efforts to use information on genetic variation to study diseases in the region.

Vita will focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), the single base variations in the genome that account for many genetic differences between individuals. SNPs can be used as markers in studies to identify the genes involved in a population's susceptibility to a given disease and its response to drugs.

By scouring databases of some 5 million SNPs, and comparing them with DNA taken from Taiwanese patient samples, Vita hopes to identify genes that are related to diseases, such as hepatitis, that are common in Asia. According to Vita's president, Ellson Chen, the databases to be used include those maintained by the international Human Genome Project and by the US-based company Celera Genomics. Celera, which owns a 5% stake in Vita, helped to set up the company after abandoning its original plan to establish a subsidiary in Taiwan.

“Western drug companies mostly concentrate on diseases common in the West,” says Chen. “This has left a gap.” As an example, he cites the difficulty of treating hepatitis B and C in Taiwan, where fewer than half of its victims respond to an interferon 'cocktail', the standard drug treatment.

“If we look at SNP patterns on 300 genes which seem to affect whether or not a patient responds to interferon, we could find out why the drug works when it does,” says Chen. By July, he hopes to have a first draft of SNPs correlated to some 300 genes related to hepatitis C.

Vita already has a contract with the National Taiwan University Hospital to obtain samples from patients with hepatitis. It also plans to look at patients with breast cancer, liver cancer and asthma. “Even diseases common around the world could have different relevant SNPs in Asian populations,” says Chen. Vita intends to cooperate with other institutes in Taiwan, especially the Academia Sinica, which is greatly expanding its functional genomics capacity.

The question of how genetic diversity between different ethnic groups influences human health is a hotly contested one. But many researchers in east Asia believe that distinct sets of SNPs within a region can influence susceptibility to disease and response to drugs.

Similarities in disease susceptibility across Asian populations have encouraged Vita to mine extensive SNP data that are becoming publicly available in Japan. Yusuke Nakamura, director of the Human Genome Center at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science, has already found 200,000 SNPs, and has data on how often each variant exists in the population at some 23,000 of these sites (see Nature 410, 1013; 2001).

“These data should help any group studying Asian populations, because the SNPs will behave very similarly among the various Asians,” says Pui-Yan Kwok, a geneticist at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, who is a scientific adviser to Vita.

→ http://snp.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp

→ http://www.vitagenomics.com