Friends: Please forward this to biomedical researchers and geneticists whom you know. Best wishes. Arun ------------------------------------- New OA database coming from the NIH The NIH will partner with Pfizer and other private corporations to launch an OA database of genetic data. See yesterday's press release from Pfizer: The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Pfizer Global Research & Development, New London, Conn., today announced the launch of a unique public-private medical research partnership -- the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN) -- to unravel the genetic causes of common diseases over the next three years. The information derived from GAIN will be publicly available to researchers world-wide. GAIN brings new scientific and financial resources to the NIH's existing whole genome association programs, encouraging all partners -- across and beyond NIH -- to work together toward the common goal of understanding the genetic contributions to common diseases. Organizers of the GAIN partnership believe the model holds promise of achieving rapid, scientifically sound results that any single researcher or institution working alone would be hard-pressed to equal. GAIN is designed to help medical researchers quickly identify the many genetic contributions to common illnesses such as heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and stroke by comparing the genetic makeup of people with the disease to people who are healthy. Identifying genetic differences between these two groups will speed up the development of new methods to prevent, diagnose, treat and even cure common illnesses....The GAIN initiative proposes to raise $60 million in private funding for genetic studies of common diseases. The initiative does not require new expenditures of public funds nor will it be implemented at the expense of any existing or pending publicly funded biomedical research programs...."Virtually all diseases have a hereditary component, which is transmitted from parent to child through the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome," said Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at NIH. "But progress in identifying the genetic factors that influence health or disease, or even the response to treatment, has been difficult. This initiative promises to identify rapidly the many genes in an individual that, taken together, contribute to an increased risk of illness -- or that increase the chances of a healthy life. As these genetic underpinnings become clear, researchers will be empowered to develop targeted treatments that either prevent illness from occurring or treat it effectively once it does." Also see Jeffrey Brainard, NIH Proposes New Project and Database to Study Genetic Causes of Disease, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: The National Institutes of Health announced on Wednesday a new research effort and free, public database about the genetic causes of common illnesses. The project, to be financed jointly by the NIH and biotechnology companies, will be designed to protect the publishing priority of researchers who put data in the repository. The database, to be managed by the agency's National Library of Medicine, would contain genetic data from thousands of patients with particular diseases, with details that could identify the patients removed. The NIH will require users of the database to wait nine months before publishing papers based on data that they did not deposit themselves, Elias A. Zerhouni, the agency's director, said at a news conference. That policy is meant to prevent scientists who donate data from being scooped by competitors. The database will allow researchers to comb through the DNA of ill and healthy people to explore whether the sick individuals have genes in common. The NIH will also pay to study how genes and environmental causes, like pollutants, combine to cause disease....The new work will begin this year, financed with at least $20-million from Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical company, and additional contributions from Affymetrix Inc., a biotechnology company. The research will initially focus on seven illnesses and health conditions, to be determined based on a peer review of research proposals. However, the NIH cited as possible candidates arthritis, asthma, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease. In his 2007 budget, released on Monday, President Bush proposed that the NIH spend an additional $68-million for work on other diseases. The project announced on Wednesday would be one of the NIH's few new efforts for 2007, when, under the president's proposal, the agency's overall budget would get no increase....The overall partnership between the NIH and the companies will be managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, an independent group that promotes similar alliances, and is to be called the Genetic Association Information Network [GAIN]....Pfizer, Affymetrix, and other contributors to the database will receive no special intellectual-property rights, according to Dr. Zerhouni. The data are considered "precompetitive," meaning that companies must perform further research on the publicly available data before they can reap commercially valuable discoveries. A similar model was followed by companies that contributed data to the HapMap project. Comment. One of the largest impediments I've seen to OA data is the fear of being scooped. Many researchers are only willing to share their data after they've published all they have to say about it themselves. I applaud the GAIN proposal as one way to solve this problem and make more data more sharable more quickly. It's likely that the benefits of sharing the data will outweigh the costs of the nine-month embargo on publishing new results based on the data --but it's not inevitable. I hope the NIH monitors the balance of these costs and benefits over time and shortens the embargo as much as it can without deterring submissions.