Genes are money these days and, not before time, the depositors and borrowers of genetic information have their own commercial bank. The First Genetic Trust (Chicago, IL), formed in October, has put itself forward as “a third party intermediary among researchers, healthcare providers, and patients.” The idea of the First Genetic Trust, according to chair and CEO, Arthur Holden, is “to provide the operational infrastructure that enables the use of genetic information in a secure, private, and reliable way.” Also in October, First Genetic Trust announced that IBM (Armonk, NY) would be its partner in developing an information technology and data security infrastructure. The formation of the company has been welcomed by potential pharmaceutical clients such as Glaxo Wellcome (London) although bioethicists remain to be convinced that the lofty principles of First Genetic Trust can be maintained in practice.
The company is backed by venture capital from ARCH Venture Partners (Chicago, IL) and Venrock Associates (New York) but seems to have sprung—at least partly formed—from the loins of the SNP Consortium. The Consortium, which aims to complete its detailed human SNP map—one SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) per 2–3 Kb—by the end of 2000, is a public–private partnership backed by the Wellcome Trust, eleven of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, IBM, and Motorola. “There is no formal connection between the SNP Consortium and First Genetic Trust,” says Holden who is chair of both groups. The informal connections extend to First Genetic's other named officers: David Wang, the company's executive vice president, was head of genomics and bioinformatics at Motorola and chair of the SNP Consortium's scientific management committee, while Andrea Califano, chief technology officer, was director of IBM's Computational Biology Centre and another member of the SNP Consortium's scientific management committee.
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