The Hindu : National : Oxford scientist keen on tie-ups in India

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Friday, Sep 21, 2007
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Oxford scientist keen on tie-ups in India

Sarah Hiddleston

His team found that junk “DNA” can be used to fight diseases such as cancer

Alexandre Akoulitchev

CHENNAI: An Oxford scientist, who discovered that DNA written off as “junk” can be used to fight diseases such as cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis, is looking to tie up with partners in India to develop practical tools that clinicians can use to diagnose and monitor patients.

Dr. Alexandre Akoulitchev and his team at the William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford University, made headlines in Britain in January because their research into gene expression offered a new approach to anti-cancer treatment — disabling the gene responsible for cell division. But the real significance of their work, published in the scientific journal Nature, lies in finding that the body’s cells recognise regulatory markers produced by ‘junk’ DNA that determine which genes are switched on, when.

By understanding how to identify these markers, scientists could develop tools to detect not only genetic predisposition to cancer, diabetes and heart disease but also very early signs of infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis.

“We want to set a new standard in molecular diagnosis,” Dr. Akoulitchev told The Hindu on the sidelines of a lecture tour promoting two new postgraduate science scholarship programmes for Indian students at Exeter College, Oxford.

The key, he said, is to use mathematical pattern recognition not previously applied in biology to retrieve genetic information. Using samples from the John Radliffe hospital, Oxford, his team was able to pinpoint renal, ovarian and prostate cancer where current tests were inconclusive.

He and his associates have set up a company — Oxford BioDynamics, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, EP Abrahams Fund and Exeter College — that has licensed the technology and holds the patents on this research. Now, he wants to set up a subsidiary in India alongside those in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, to take his work from the laboratory bench to the hospital floor.

“We need the expertise, industry, infrastructure and investment to bring it to the market and treat a large population at affordable prices,” he said. India has the momentum that he thinks will make this a reality; discussions with a hospital chain and a pharmaceutical company are already under way.

“If it is affordable, it will change the standard of life in India in a very simple way,” he said. “For example, it will enable simultaneous HIV/TB tests as the WHO currently recommends. For the growing middle class, it would allow quick and easy health screening and thereby improve the quality of their productive life.”

He and his company need not have taken this route. “We had conversations with Oxford and their lawyers, who said that it would be better to target the several diseases with which the developed world is obsessed and charge a bomb for it. We just said no, we are not interested. And in the long term it will always pay to do the foot work now, to develop [the research], make it affordable and be able to go through hundreds of thousands of millions of samples.”

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