The British-led project – which may eventually cost around £1.4billion - will eventually help create treatments for diseases such as cancer, asthma, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and diabetes.
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| The British led project - which may eventually cost around £1.4billion - will research around two million genomes to help create treatments for life threatening diseases (file photo) |
The consortium including scientists from Cambridge University and drug giant AstraZeneca said it would take around 10 years to complete the huge project.
Ruth March, vice president of personalised health care at the drug company AstraZeneca, one of the partners announcing the project: 'We are going to be researching two million genomes, an unprecedented number.
'That's necessary because we are going to be looking for rare differences between individuals.'
She added: 'We hope this will mean we will be able to create more precise drugs, rather than just treating the symptoms.'
The rare differences will allow better drug treatments to specifically target an individual's disease.
For example, while two people may have asthma symptoms, they may come from different genetic causes, which the new project will be able to discover.
This will allow the development of drug treatments that are more specific to individuals – so-called 'personalised medicine'.
Some 500,000 DNA samples are coming from AstraZeneca's own clinical trials in the UK and worldwide.
At present, it costs hundreds of pounds to sequence all the data in one person's genome, so over two million people that would cost some £1.4billion.
The scientists are 'sequencing' or reading the genome, which is the full set of instructions for creating every cell and organ of our bodies.
The amount of data sampled – 5 petabytes - would amount to a stack of DVDs that are four times as tall as the Shard skyscraper in London.
The project is only possible because new technology allows DNA codes to be read one million times faster than was the case two years ago.
The world centre for the research, the Centre for Genomics Research, will be at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in in Cambridge.
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| At present, it costs hundreds of pounds to sequence all the data in one person's genome, so over two million people that would cost some £1.4billion |
'We need very large numbers of genomes to find the micro-differences between us'.
David Goldstein, chief of AstraZeneca's Genomics Advisory Board, said 'We can find the precise differences of how people respond to medicines.
'Some times we can talk about one single letter change that can make the difference and we can zero in on that.
'This has the potential to accelerate our understanding of disease. This will improve our understanding of disease and help us to find new pathways to treat it.'
The technology has already helped one patient, Mr Goldstein said: one girl suffering from a neurological disease was not expected to have very long to live.
'We sequenced her and found she had a very rare genetic disease'. The disease meant her body had problems transporting a vitamin, B2, around her body.
'That's not something we would have suspected on clinical grounds.' The girl was treated by giving her large doses of the vitamin, Mr Goldstein said.
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