Diagnostics & Imaging Week Correspondent
The second phase of the Norwegian Functional Genomics Program (FUGE) has secured NOK420 million (US$70.3 million), which will be allocated to research programs between now and 2011, but the board responsible for the initiative is seeking an additional NOK490 million. An extra NOK45 million is being made available in October to fund industry-driven projects.
Despite Norway’s burgeoning wealth, driven by oil and gas exports, the country has kept a tight rein on research spending. The previous phase of FUGE, which ran from 2002 to 2006, received about NOK150 million annually —just half of what the country’s research community originally sought to put the state’s biotechnology research base on an internationally competitive footing.
The current allocation to FUGE has been pegged to the same level, but its board is seeking a restoration of the originally targeted annual spend of NOK300 million when the government decides on its 2008 budget in the fall.
“In October this year, we will see what they will do next year,” FUGE coordinator Steinar Bergseth told Diagnostics & Imaging Week’s sister publication BioWorld International.
A major constraint on government spending has been its overriding aim not to overheat the economy with oil and gas revenues and thereby introduce inflationary pressures. Most of Norway’s surpluses have been invested in a pension fund — the Government Pension Fund of Norway (previously the Petroleum Fund) — which is currently worth around $300 billion. Only a small percentage of this is spent within the economy every year, and this is diverted toward education, provisions for the elderly and social benefits. International equities and other financial instruments are the fund’s main investment targets. Domestic firms do not receive funding.
The government aims to grow the biotechnology sector organically, and it wants the private sector to provide most of the investment, Bergseth said. The problem is that Norwegian investors are not strongly engaged with biotechnology. “They have not woken up yet,” said Bergseth.
The first phase of FUGE helped establish core research platforms in bioinformatics, integrative genetics, Arabidopsis research, microarray technology, structural biology, proteomics, molecular imaging, transgenic mice, microbial technology and two biobank initiatives.
“Our main task was to make Norway one research nation, if you can put it that way,” Bergseth said. “They are all in place and have been in place for three years.”
In addition, 22 biotechnology companies shared around NOK117 million in funding, mostly to support early stage product development for which there is little investment capital available in Norway. Troms -based Lytix Biopharma AS gained funding for its development of peptide-based cancer drugs, for example, while Avexxin AS, of Trondheim, used cash from the program for early stage drug discovery work in rheumatoid arthritis and glomerulonephritis.
The program also funded several companies in the aquaculture sector, a key industry for Norway. These included Overhalla-based Pharmaq AS, which received funding for development of a vaccine against Piscirickettsia salmonis, an intracellular pathogen of several species of farmed salmon and trout. lesund-based PatoGene Analyse AS gained support for a project characterizing viral pathogens of farmed Atlantic salmon.
In FUGE II, support for the core research platforms will continue — on the advice of an international evaluation conducted late last year — but several will be networked nationally across several centers, following the uptake of technologies, such as proteomics and molecular imaging, that were difficult to acquire at the beginning of the decade. Around half of the budget will be available for research projects.
Affymetrix launches cancer alliance
Affymetrix (Santa Clara, California) reported launch of the Collaborations in Cancer Research Program, an alliance it has formed with up to 30 of Europe’s leading cancer researchers. It said that participants in the program were selected on the basis of past contributions to their fields and the potential to make “significant advancements” in their research.
Affymetrix said it will “partially fund” selected research projects that demonstrate clinical utility, enabling participants to develop new approaches to elucidate cancer mechanisms and to accelerate discoveries in more than 10 different forms of cancer.
The studies selected for the Collaborations in Cancer Research Program incorporate a number of different microarray-based applications, including copy number analysis, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), gene expression and splicing pattern analysis.
In addition to helping participants obtain tools and training, Affymetrix will provide forums where investigators can exchange knowledge and share best practices.
Ashok Venkitaraman, MD, PhD, a professor in the department of oncology and the Medical Research Council Cancer Cell Unit at the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK), said, “The program provides an opportunity to learn from other people’s experience and drive our own research forward.”
Venkitaraman’s research uses ChIP to explore the roles of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which were among the first genes to be linked to a high risk of developing early-onset cancer. “The latest Affymetrix tiling arrays cover the entire genome at high enough resolution to enable new insights from ChIP and expression profiling experiments,” he said. “The company also has a lot of in-house experience with data analysis and data collection, which is a big advantage for labs such as mine.”
Michael Hummel, PhD, group leader at the Charit -Universit tsmedizin Berlin Institute of Pathology, previously used Affymetrix expression arrays to uncover a 58-gene expression signature that reliably and reproducibly distinguishes patients with Burkitt’s lymphoma from those with large-B-cell lymphoma. Now, his team is using Affymetrix promoter tiling arrays to study transcription factor binding in lymphoma.
“Extremely complex assays such as ChIP-on-chip on Affymetrix tiling arrays are able to generate a reliable, reproducible and broad view on the global transcription factor binding profile,” said Hummel. “This is really fascinating because the whole-genome approach provides powerful insight into gene regulation.”