Garvan, Telstra and the government in talks over genome project

The Garvan Institute is in talks with Telstra and the government to create a project to decode the human genome.

John Mattick, Executive Director, Garvin Institute, photographed in the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics. The Garvan is about to announce a major deal with Telstra where they have secured millions of dollars in funding for human genome research. Britta Campion / The Australian.

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research is holding talks with Telstra, the government and a host of hi-tech research institutions to create an ambitious $400 million project to decode the mysteries of the human genome and potentially unlock new ­medicines to treat cancers and rare diseases.

The project will help researchers better understand the genetic precursors for diseases. Once complete, it will create a new ­genomic medicine service for the health system, offering better ­diagnosis and the potential for more effective treatments.

The project would be closely modelled on the British government’s 100,000 Genomes Project, a four-year £300 million ($617m) scheme between government and medical, research and technology institutions to sequence the human genomes of 25,000 cancer patients, 15,000 people with a rare disease and 35,000 healthy relatives. The British project — run by Genomics England, a state-owned company set up in 2012 — has ambitions to map 10,000 genomes by the end of this year and 100,000 by 2017. A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions, which in a human runs to about three billion DNA pairs. The Australian understands the Garvan Institute has been holding informal discussions in recent months with public and private institutions, including Telstra and the federal government, to discuss how they can form a syndicate to bring a similar project to Australia.

“There are very few opportunities for Australia to be a major player in a major technological, social and economic revolution,” John Mattick, the director of the Garvan Institute of Medical ­Research, said. “Genomic medicine will transform healthcare and the economy, and create a new generation of innovative ­regional and global industries,” he said. “We are hoping that Australia will capitalise on its outstanding healthcare system and longstanding investment in biomedical R&D to lead the region and the world in genomic medicine. The fast game is on now.”

Although the talks being led by the Garvan Institute are of an informal nature and no financial commitments have been made, it is understood Telstra is considering investing tens of millions of dollars — as well as its expertise in information networks and data analysis — to get the project up and running.

The Garvan Institute is prepared to make a similar financial contribution while other ­research and medical institutes have been approached to provide funding. The federal government is being lobbied to provide substantial funding — believed to be as much as $100m a year — for the project.

The Garvan Institute said $400m would be required to fund the four-year project. It said it would like the government to take ownership of the project and for other institutions to support it with cash or in-kind.

“Garvan is an international leader in the human genomic analysis, but its desire is to see a nat­ional project initiated, overseen by an independent national board set up by and reporting to government,” Meredith Ross, a spokeswoman for Garvan, said.

“Success in this project will require expertise, infrastructure and financial resources from many stakeholders, including institutions across Australia.

“Garvan would like to see relevant companies support the project, either in cash or in-kind, bearing in mind that its essential aim is to build capacity in genomic medicine and associated infrastructure in Australia for the public good and to foster an innovation economy around the next generation of personal and community health information.

“We can envision opportunities for many organisations, both public and private, contributing to the program so that we build a dynamic, innovative genomics economy that suits the needs of Australia.”

The Garvan Institute believes government support for the project would be repaid in net savings in healthcare expenditure derived from the development of an Australian database of how ­genetic information relates to ­patient clinical disease and ­treatment outcomes. This database would form a cornerstone of the genomes program and allow Australian healthcare professionals and researchers to access genetic information ­appropriate to the Australian population, rather than relying solely on genetic and clinical information generated overseas.

Some of the Garvan Institute’s ambitions for the project were revealed in a recent submission it made to the House of Represen­tatives’ Inquiry into Chronic Disease Prevention and Management in Primary Health Care.

“Health systems worldwide are being challenged by ageing populations, the growing burden of chronic disease and rapidly increasing medical costs,” it said. “New genomic approaches to healthcare delivery and management will fuel a drive towards personal health optimisation through early identification and targeted treatment of individuals at risk of disease. This will have a transformational impact on personal health and wellbeing, health economics and national productivity.

“It seems likely that within a decade or two, individual genome sequences, most likely done at birth and at indicated times throughout life, will become an integral part of patient medical records and management.”

The Garvan submission says a key challenge in establishing an effective sequencing project lies in getting access to the “sophisticated infrastructure that links comprehensive genome knowledge databases to extensive e-health record networks”.

“This infrastructure would be accessible to clinicians for effective decision-making support based on patients’ genomic sequence information, as well as to researchers and health system managers to derive informative conclusions from aggregated population data,” Garvan said in its submission.

Telstra, which is working on building an integrated health system, could play a vital role in providing the platform and technology to link clinicians with data generated from the project. “We’re supportive of a national gen­omics program and can see the role genomics will play in the future of healthcare and person­alised medicine (but) it is very much the early days of discussions as to whether we will be directly involved,” said the head of health for Telstra, Shane Solomon.

The telco giant has been on an acquisition path over the past 24 months, spending more than $150m on investments and joint ventures to beef up its stand-alone health division and build the nat­ion’s first integrated health system that will provide technology solutions in telemedicine, aged and residential care, hospitals, radiology and pathology.

Telstra aims to grow the business from revenue of about $78m a year into a $1 billion-a-year business and be the nation’s leading e-health provider within five years.

The sequencing of genomes could prove a fruitful investment for Telstra, with the Garvan Institute saying “the era of personalised medicine/genomic healthcare will be realised when genomic information can be used routinely to improve the health, diagnosis and treatment of all ­individuals”.

Genomic sequencing and the trove of data it promises to deliver has already achieved significant breakthroughs in medicine and patient care.