BGI Bags a Big Pharma Alliance with Merck
By Kevin Davies
September 15, 2010 | At a press conference in Shenzhen, China, today, BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) and Merck announced what is being downplayed as “the signing of a statement of intent to initiate and develop a working relationship.”
Other sources, however, portray this as a substantive, wide-ranging and long-term agreement between the two organizations, marking the most significant partnership announced so far between a China’s BGI and a major pharmaceutical company. BGI is mounting an aggressive push to attract customers and collaborators to use its new unparalleled next-generation sequencing (NGS) facility in Hong Kong and its formidable bioinformatics resources in Shenzhen.
Merck Research Laboratories president Peter Kim described the statement of intent as “an initial step designed to bring together Merck's expertise in pharmaceutical development with the powerful sequencing and bioinformatics capabilities of BGI. The science and technology of genomics and epigenetics offer the potential to transform medicine. We are excited to move forward towards a collaboration with BGI in our efforts to advance these areas of research.”
“Great science can never be done alone, and this is a first step towards demonstrating the power of combining the scientific expertise of our two leading organizations committed to yielding the value of genomic technologies and data analysis to advancing healthcare around the world,” said Wang Jun, executive director of BGI Shenzhen.
According to a press release, Merck and BGI “intend to explore areas of mutual interest in healthcare research and discovery with the common goal of creating value from the massive output of genomic information” that is being produced by next-generation sequencing technologies.
The agreement lays a framework upon which Merck and BGI will collaborate in areas such as biomarker discovery, target validation and drug development, as well as formulate specific projects. The release says that this also includes “the establishment of mutual offices in proximity to their respective facilities in the United States and China to enable closer collaboration between scientists from both companies.”
This wide-ranging collaboration marks a major milestone both for BGI and big pharma. The alliance signals that big pharma is not just perusing the potential of NGS but getting serious about testing the possibilities of whole-genome sequencing and RNA-seq. The stakes are immense, as discussed by Amgen’s Sasha Kamb in the next issue (September/October) of Bio-IT World. “The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for its poor record of clinical prediction,” writes Kamb (who identified the BRCA1 gene in 1994 at Myriad Genetics). “When we spend tens of millions of dollars on a drug candidate with the expectation that we’ve discovered a safe and efficacious drug, fully nine times out ten, we’re wrong. Can massive amounts of DNA sequence data help?”
The Merck deal also marks a coup for BGI Americas, BGI’s new outpost in Cambridge, Mass., which aims to forge alliances and find customers in industry and academia. According to BGI Hong Kong chief Alex Wong, BGI is in discussions with several other big pharma companies.
Editor’s note: Bio-IT World managing editor Allison Proffitt recently became one of the first journalists to be granted inside access to BGI Hong Kong, and her report will appear later this month in Bio-IT World magazine.