By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
Pharmaceutical
giant Hoffman-La Roche will try to develop a schizophrenia drug
using information gathered from the Icelandic gene pool, the company
is announcing Wednesday.
The drug development
effort was spurred by research done by deCODE genetics, a Reykjavik,
Iceland-based company that has been hunting for disease genes
by using the entire Icelandic population as a study subject.
In February
1998, Roche agreed to pay deCODE up to $200 million for information
culled from Icelanders' DNA. Since the deal was signed, deCODE
has found genes related to about eight different diseases.
``It confirms
our initial optimism,'' said Klaus Lindpaintner, director of Roche
Genetics.
The schizophrenia
gene, discovered last year, is a promising lead for drug development
because it encodes a protein that appears to be involved with
the disease itself, said deCODE CEO Kari Stefansson. Another protein
that interacts with the one made by the gene may also provide
a target for a drug, he said.
Schizophrenia
affects about 1 percent of the world's population, and usually
appears during adolescence or young adulthood. Current drugs can
control the hallucinations, delusions and emotional disturbance
caused by the disease, but so little is known about it that no
treatments address the cause.
In a second
project to be announced Wednesday, deCODE has identified a gene
associated with peripheral arterial occlusive disease, a blockage
of the arteries that mostly affects a small percentage of people
older than 65. Again, the gene appears to encode a protein critical
to the development of the disease.
``We have
given them a significant number of possibilities to work with,''
Stefansson said.
It is still
far too early to say whether those possibilities will lead to
drugs. Though gene-hunting companies have discovered thousands
of promising genes, ``all these projects are in very early stages,''
said Ravi Mehrotra, a London-based biotechnology industry analyst
with SG Cowen Securities.
Stefansson's
company, founded in 1996, is creating a genetic database containing
most of Iceland's 270,000 people. The company hopes that the information,
once collected, will help identify difficult-to-find genes for
common ailments like cancer, heart disease and alcoholism. The
genes identified by deCODE so far have come from smaller-scale
projects involving dozens or hundreds of individuals.
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