BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - The UK government said it will spend £30 million (US$43.11 million) to spark a "genetics revolution" in the National Health Service (NHS), ensuring the benefits of scientific breakthroughs are passed on to patients, and delivering the potential of genetics for improving health.

The number of NHS staff specializing in genetics will be doubled to 600 in the next five years, the number of patients seeing genetics specialists will increase 80 percent to 120,000 a year, and two national reference laboratories will be set up to identify tests and treatments for rare genetic disorders.

This will be backed by a £10 million investment to initiate the formation of four "genetic knowledge parks." These will be scientific and clinical centers seeking to improve diagnosis, counseling and treatment of patients, and spinning out companies focused on genetics technologies.

Announcing the program, the Health Secretary Alan Milburn said, "Advances in genetics will inevitably impact on health services and health prospects. The challenge for us is how best to ensure the impact is as positive as it will be profound, that it benefits all of our society, not just some of it."

As a first step, the government will seek to allay public fears about genetics, by legislating to explicitly ban human reproductive cloning, and introducing a temporary moratorium on the use of genetic tests by the insurance industry, if the advisory body the Human Genetics Commission (which is currently examining the issue) recommends it do so.

Milburn said the genetics revolution will make the NHS look very different from the health service of today. Developments in genetics should allow the eradication of much of the trial and error common in medical practice by making it possible to screen for risk factors before symptoms develop, he said.

"The NHS of the future should increasingly allow us to predict and prevent the common diseases of later life," Milburn said.

To realize the potential of genetic advances, the NHS will have to change the services it offers, gearing them to prevention, not just treatment. Hospitals might do less invasive surgery, but more gene therapy. Primary care services will provide more genetic screening and genetic counseling.

Genetic services will be spread out of specialist centers to general practitioners, health centers and hospitals. There will be a new breed of primary care genetics specialists working alongside family doctors.

Breast cancer screening is likely to be one of the first genetic testing services to be rolled out. Milburn announced that he has reached an agreement with the Cancer Research Campaign, the charity that owns the rights to the BRCA2 breast cancer gene, to test for the gene without charge. Discussions are in hand with Myriad Genetics Inc. over the second major breast cancer gene, BRCA1, and Milburn said, "I hope these discussions will be a model for future collaborations."

It has been argued that the cost of implementing genetic advances would be too great for the NHS to absorb. "That is not my view," Milburn said. "[There will be up-front costs] but down the line there could be significant financial gains to put alongside major health gains."