TITLE: Celera to Quit Selling
Genome Information AUTHOR: Andrew Pollack PUBLICATION: New
York Times DATE: 27 April 2005 URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/business/27celera.html
New York Times | April 27, 2005
CELERA TO QUIT SELLING GENOME INFORMATION
By Andrew Pollack
Celera Genomics, which raced with the publicly financed Human Genome Project to decipher the human DNA sequence, has decided to abandon the business of selling genetic information. The company said yesterday that it was discontinuing its genome database subscription business and putting the information into the public domain.
Celera succeeded in signing up some subscribers to its genome database, but the company is still losing money and it never quite calmed critics who argued that fundamental information about basic human biology should be openly available to all.
Originally led by the maverick scientist J. Craig Venter, Celera's race with the Human Genome Project ended in a sort of tie announced at a White House ceremony in 2000.
But Celera's effort to become the "Bloomberg of biology" by selling its data faltered quickly because the public project was offering much the same information to scientists free of charge. In 2002, Celera ousted Dr. Venter, de-emphasized the information business and began trying to develop drugs instead.
Celera has continued to provide the information to a dwindling number of existing subscribers, and those subscriptions, costing thousands of dollars for a single academic scientist to millions of dollars a year for a big drug company, have provided the bulk of its revenue. But Celera said it would discontinue the service, called the Celera Discovery System, after most of the remaining contracts expire by the end of June.
About 25 companies and 200 academic institutions subscribed to Celera's service at its peak; the company would not say how many subscribers were left.
Company scientists said they would donate the information on 30 billion base pairs - the chemical units of DNA - to a federally run database. The information includes basic DNA sequences for humans, mice and rats and some data on genetic variations but excludes some newer information Celera is using to develop diagnostic tests.
Francis S. Collins, the federal scientist who runs the publicly financed project, hailed Celera's move as a "wonderfully generous contribution" and "a strong endorsement of this kind of information ultimately being accessible to anybody."
He said the mouse and rat data would be particularly useful because strains Celera sequenced were different from those the publicly financed scientists used.
Celera's revenue peaked at $121 million in the fiscal year that ended June 2002. In the current fiscal year, ending this June, revenues are expected to be only $29 million to $32 million, with the decline primarily a result of expired subscriptions.
The company, based in Rockville, Md., has its own tracking stock but is owned by the Applera Corporation. Applera also owns Applied Biosystems of Foster City, Calif., a leading maker of laboratory equipment that includes DNA sequencing machines.
In 2002, Celera transferred the marketing of the genome information to Applied Biosystems, which used the data to develop tests for particular genetic variants that it sells to researchers.
Applied Biosystems executives said they hoped that putting the data into the public domain would encourage more scientists to use that data and then to order tests.
Dennis Gilbert, the chief scientific officer of Applied Biosystems, said in an interview that the company did not consider it a capitulation to turn the formerly proprietary data over to the public. He said the competition from Celera had accelerated the public project. "I feel like ultimately we did the best for science," he said.
Dr. Venter, who now runs his own nonprofit research institute, said in a statement yesterday, "Moving the Celera data into the public domain is something I have been strongly in favor of, and I feel it sets a good precedent for companies who are sitting on gene and genome data sets that have little or no commercial value, but would be of great benefit to the scientific community."