January 2000

G-Commerce

Continued from page 1

By Antonio Regalado

DoubleTwist's software relies on gene data residing on public domain servers, such as those maintained by the National Institutes of Health. But biotech companies also plan to start giving away bits and pieces of proprietary data on the portals. Posting a teaser on the Internet is "an effective way to get a sample of what you do into the hands of many thousands of researchers," says Peter Meldrum, CEO of Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. Myriad has made a free database of protein information (see past issue: "The Next Genome Project," TR May/June 1998) available both on its own Web site and through Pangea's DoubleTwist.com.

In the future, the gene-commerce sites could become trading posts for patents as well as data. In fact, that's just the expanded business that Hyseq's GeneSolutions is hoping to get into. As Gruber explains it, every drug company and university is amassing patents on genes, most of which they don't use but which may be preventing others from investing in research that could lead to life-saving medicines. Gruber figures one way to rationalize the marketplace is to let scientists browse for genes and trade intellectual property online. "E-commerce lets information exchange hands and industry develop in a way that's impossible if information and patent rights are balkanized," says Gruber.

Some biologists are skeptical of the commercial portals, while others worry that health-conscious consumers who are already doing their own health research online might start dialing up information on their DNA. Yale University bioinformaticist Mark Gerstein says: "If you want to connect the public to their genetic information, that's better done through a doctor than a Web site."