Gutnick buys rights to islanders’ genes

DNA hunt for new drugs - (Courtesy of Herald Sun, Melbourne - 21 Nov,2000)

A Melbourne biotech company headed by Millionaire Joe Gutnick has secured exclusive rights to the entire gene pool of the Tongan Islanders.

Autogen Limited will use genetically unique DNA of Tongans in its hunt for drugs to treat diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, cancers and ulcers.

The hunt based on finding links between diseases and particular genes, could earn the company hundreds of millions of dollars if drugs were commercialised from the Pacific Islanders’ genes.

Mr Gutnick is chairman and managing director of Autogen. Autogen is negotiating the same deal with other Pacific nations in an expansion that could make it the only company allowed to perform genetic studies on the entire Polynesian race in the western Pacific. But the Tongans, population 110,000 have not been told of the deal which was signed last week, according to a local Catholic sister and a pro-democracy MP.

Autogen’s director of research and development, Professor Greg Collier, said the exclusive arrangement would bring jobs and a better-funded health system to Tongans. The company is setting up a health database to track the prevalence of common diseases such as mature age onset diabetes within families. A research laboratory will be built on Tonga’s main island and attached to the nation’s only hospital in the main land. When patients go to the government-owned hospital, they will be asked to donate blood to Autogen, Prof. Collier said.

The blood would be used to extract DNA from which to form genetic pedigrees of family members in the search for disease-causing genes. "The Tongan government will get royalties if anything comes of it. There will be more jobs and the population will get any drugs that come of the research for free," Prof. Collier said.

Patients would be asked to give their full informed consent before blood samples were taken, he said.

The deal is only the second of its kind in the world. An international consortium that included German pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche has the rights to the genes of Iceland’s population. Autogen will begin collecting DNA samples from Tongans late this year or early in 2001. "The contract is with the Ministry of Health to set up a database and we have exclusive rights to (the information from) that," Prof. Collier said.

The DNA of Tongans and other Polynesian islanders is valuable to biotech companies because they are more genetically isolated then other populations such as Melbourne’s, whose families are made up of people of different ethnic backgrounds.

"Tonga has lot of history in their family groupings. They know who is related to whom," Prof. Collier said. But like most Polynesians, as they became more exposed to the western culture and diet, Tongans began to die of the same diseases that afflict western nations.

Prof. Collier said he hoped thousands of Tongans would give blood. "It could be 30 percent or 50 percent or 90 percent, but we think lots of people will want to take part," he said. But the assistant editor of Catholic monthly publication Taumu’a Lelei, Sister Sinai, said Tongans had not been told of the deal.