Mapping of the Chinese Genome

A stand-alone institute set up by the founders of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), BGI Shenzhen started operations in April 2007. It specializes in medical genomics, which is the study of how genes affect health, disease and responses to drugs and environmental factors. Like similar facilities in the West, its mission will be to make and publicize scientific breakthroughs that may have little chance of immediate commercial application but could be of great long-term importance for advancing knowledge in the field. This is an unusual way for a research organization in a developing country to spend its money. It could choose instead to take advantage of discoveries made by institutes in the developed countries which share them with the world’s scientific community for free. Nevertheless, by doing research themselves, the Chinese could gain much valuable insight.

Take, for instance, China’s perennial problem with hepatitis B. Scientists have already found genes which they think make Chinese more vulnerable to a much higher rate of infection than Westerners. But more work is needed to identify precise factors. A large part of BGI Shenzhen’s research will be towards that goal. More generally, in the drug development phase, pharmaceutical companies often have to abandon many promising substances because of the side effects they produce in a small minority of subjects. Sometimes the effects occur along ethnic lines: the main influenza drug, Tamiflu, for instance, has been linked to depression and suicide in Japan. If BGI Shenzhen’s research can help pinpoint certain genetic susceptibilities of Chinese, it should pave the way for better medicines tailored to Asian patients.

The extent to which China can use Western discoveries in medical genomics without doing additional research is very limited. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved some 2,000 genes as reliable markers of those at risk from specific diseases. Yet only 3% of this number are used in China. This is because a single gene rarely gives rise to a disease on its own. Secondary, often unidentified, genes almost always also play a part. These genes may occur in greater or lesser frequency among Chinese than they do among the FDA’s reference group of Americans. BGI Shenzhen’s work hopes to shed more light on such differences.

BGI Shenzhen is the individual initiative of three geneticists. Yang Huanming, Yu Jun and Wang Jian studied and worked in the US and Europe before returning to their native country in the mid-1990s. In July 1999 they broke away from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Human Genome Center, which they had set up a year earlier. They then established their own company, the Beijing Genomics Institute, in an industrial park near the capital’s airport. The government of Beijing municipality’s Shunyi county donated the land. Most of the money for purchasing its 12 sequencing machines and other subsequent funds were raised by Mr Wang, who had already achieved success as an entrepreneur developing and selling HIV antibodies diagnostic test kits.

Meanwhile, Mr Yang, after months of campaigning, won a 1% share of the US-initiated Human Genome Project for BGI to sequence a section of human chromosome 3, now known as ‘the Beijing region’. He did this without the support of the Chinese government, which initially saw no point in contributing resources to a $3USbn project led by the world’s richest countries. But two months after BGI started work on it CAS gave its official approval. This elevated the project to a national one.

Since then, BGI has mapped the genome of the rice plant and the silk worm, and worked with foreign laboratories to do the same for the chicken and pig. In 2003 during the SARS outbreak its scientists sequenced the genome of the virus and developed diagnostic tests.

Better medicine is not BGI Shenzhen’s only reason for mapping the Chinese genome. Its research will also give a clearer picture of the evolutionary history of the Chinese, which holds great appeal for a people who pride themselves on their racial uniqueness. In fact, BGI Shenzhen is part of an international research consortium piecing together the most detailed map of the human genome and its variations around the world for potential medical applications. Other participants in the project include the National Human Genome Research Institute in the US and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of the UK.

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