how unlucky!, page-22

BIT OLD BUT HERE IT IS KG.

From todays age/smh. Prob the reason for the 15% rise?
Science finds profit in microscopic junk
By Garry Barker
April 22 2002

Hanover Street, Fitzroy is not the sort of place you would expect to find world-beating technology, global enterprise, and millions of dollars. But there it is, along the road from an old pub, hunkered down in a squat grey building among rows of venerable, slightly worn, Melbourne terrace houses - the brainchild of a man who, in scientific terms, has turned junk into gold.

This is the rather spartan headquarters of Genetic Technologies, one of Australia's 20 leading biotechnology companies and one that has the market taking notice.

GT shares closed at 60 cents on Friday, down four cents, but in the past month they have risen almost 40 per cent, most of that being before its latest deals were announced.

GT is the owner of patent rights to the non-coding regions of every gene in every known species on the planet, human, plant and animal, down to even the microscopic amoebae .

How that came about is a tribute to the curiosity and determination of a small group of researchers, led by Dr Mervyn Jacobson, a medical man turned scientist and entrepreneur, who loves a chat and a challenge.

It is also, in its way, part of the still-evolving saga of the human genome and genetic engineering in general.

"We started looking at the non-coding area in 1989," Dr Jacobson says. "If you look at the DNA helix and stretch it out, it has hot spots and spaces in between. The hot spots are the genes. Within each gene there is a small piece that codes for protein, the photocopier if you like, that makes the protein copies.

"According to the research of the time, this was the only valuable part," he says. "The remainder, it was said, was junk: it did not do anything.

"It was said that genetic research was so complicated even looking at just the coding region was hard enough without sifting through junk. So this junk was ignored," he says.

Dr Jacobson says the team thought it strange that 95 per cent of the DNA could be conserved and passed on over millions of years, and still be junk.

"If it were really useless, selection would have got rid of it," he says. "If it did nothing, any abnormalities in it would not matter. But it has been conserved, which means that any abnormalities have been eliminated.

"So, 13 years, and about $20 million later we have proven that the non-coding DNA is not junk but highly relevant and valuable.

"Science still does not know all of the story. But even if we do not know why God put it there, it is now clear that it is not random and it is relevant in helping us diagnose diseases and improve the efficiency of tissue-typing for transplantation," Dr Jacobson says.

"The Human Genome Project showed in early 2001 that there were roughly 100,000 proteins in the human body, circulating to rebuild, control and replace human cells. The view then was one gene, one protein. But there are only about 30,000 genes, so it is obvious that the non-coding parts of the DNA have a role in determining the function of genes," he says.

Nearly 15 years from first addressing the question, Dr Jacobson and his company have begun to sell licences to the knowledge nobody wanted.

Non-exclusive licensing deals with a total value of about $2 million have been signed with two large US genetic companies and arrangements with another 20 are in discussion.

Negotiations also are under way with North American companies using the technology to which GT owns patents, some without knowing it, all without yet paying. Dr Jacobson says he is confident amicable agreements will be reached with all of them.

That done by mid-May, Dr Jacobson will move to GT's European base in Switzerland and begin similar dealings with British, Swiss, French and German genetic research and engineering companies. Talks are also under way with research companies in Australia and could lead to GT patents helping develop superior strains of sheep, horses, cattle and pigs.

"There is interest among scientists working on the gene, BRACA1, that causes breast cancer," he says. "They have identified the coding region, sequenced it and patented it. That's fine. Now they have to develop a test. They have now admitted that if you limit the test to the coding region covered by their patent they do not get an answer. They must extend into the non-coding region. It may be the case for many things."

The idea that non-coding regions in DNA might not be junk first came from Dr Malcolm Simons, a New Zealand immunogeneticist working in Melbourne. Dr Jacobson was running a standard medical diagnostic laboratory at the time. "Someone told me I should meet this Simons, he had some off-the-wall ideas."

They met in Melbourne and formed their company, Genetype.

"We couldn't raise any serious capital in Australia. Nobody here was interested in investing in bio-tech, so we went to Switzerland, though the research laboratory remained in Melbourne with others established in San Francisco and Fort Collins, near Denver," he says.

Along the way Dr Jacobson set up, and later sold, Cytomation, an instrument-making company in the US built originally to produce machines to sort sperm and foetal cells.

Public listing came in 2000. Using Duketon Goldfields Ltd as the stock exchange vehicle, they rolled Genetype into Genetic Technologies and went public.

The share is one of the fastest-growing on the ASX and there are moves to list on NASDAQ.

Dr Jacobson is busy with licensing deals and a mass of plans to do ever more research.

"Some say it is wrong that we own the DNA," he says.

"We don't. We own a strategy for using the information within the DNA and we have a worldwide patent on that."

As he says it the notion forms that his is a space worth watching.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/04/21/1019233296560.html