In mid-April, formation of the SNP Consortium was finally announced. After almost a year of discussion and negotiation, 10 major pharmaceutical companies and five leading publicly funded genomics institutes have come together in a $45 million, two-year project that aims to identify, map, and put into the public domain hundreds of thousands of human single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). At least in its current form, which is much reduced from earlier projections, a number of biotechnology stock analysts believe the SNP Consortium carries little threat to commercial prospectors.
A report from Hambrecht & Quist (New York) issued in March concluded that the SNP Consortium would not mount a significant challenge to specialist genomics companies such as Genset (Paris), InCyte (Palo Alto, CA), and Celera (Rockville, MD). H&Q considered that several operational and project management issues could reduce the effectiveness of the consortium. "There has been no academic lead venture that has ever been competitive with the commercial operations," says H&Q's Robert J. Olan. "It's a significant amount of money for the academic centers," he says, but for the companies, the main advantage of consortium membership is "in building relationships." A report from BancBoston Robertson Stephens (an international investment banking firm) echoes this doubt about the effectiveness of pharmaceutical consortia and public/private collaborations, commenting that "the history of [such groups] has not been met with ringing success."
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