Britain’s path to economic and national renewal is the genome revolution – The Telegraph

Dr Sanghera said the UKs golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London could become the Silicon Valley of global genomics provided the government plays its cards well.

If you look at the way Silicon Valley developed it was the result of defence spending after World War Two, which then led to a micro-electronics hub. We could see the same here with life sciences: it could be a big source of export revenues and help a lot of developing countries, he said.

The impediment is the constant crisis overwhelming the NHS. We need to stop using our brilliant technologists to fight fires and create a separate research institute focussed on nothing but genomics. It should be like the cracking of the Enigma Code, he said.

The first dividend of the whole genome is to diagnose illness early and open the way to personalised medicine. The more futuristic second phase is to correct genes through the miracle cure of gene therapy. It is no longer science fiction.

A trial by University College London and Royal Free Hospital and with Freeline Therapeutics concluded last month that a single injection of gene therapy could largely restore normal blood-clotting for patients with Haemophilia B.

Unfortunately, this is much harder to pull off with the common diseases of diabetes, cancer, heart failure, or Alzheimers, since there are so many other variables and triggers a complex cascade in the lingo but the direction of travel is clear.

Kate Tatton-Brown, a professor of genetics at St Georges, said it used to take three months and cost $1,000 to read a single gene. Now we can do all 22,000 genes in parallel in a couple of days. But it is still no easy task to isolate a variant and determine whether an anomaly is noise or the harbinger of disease.

It is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, she said.

Were just at the beginning. We havent even begun to mine the normal genetic variation and understand the complexity of diseases.

Natural variation is the reason why there is no one-size-fits-all treatment but it is also key to our survival as a species. If we all had the same immune system, wed be extinct by now, said Sir Munir Pirmohamed, professor of pharmacogenetics at Liverpool University.

It is estimated that 3pc of all deaths in rich countries are caused by adverse reactions to medical drugs. Some 7pc of hospital patients have serious complications from drugs, and the consequences can be very expensive.

The appropriate dose of warfarin varies wildly for each person. If you get the dose wrong for some auto-immune disorders you can end up with bone-marrow depression or even death.

Sir Munir said pharmacogenetics is starting to pre-empt tragic mistakes. With a point-of-care test for warfarin you can get a result in 45 minutes that tells you the right dose. We could avoid diabetes being triggered by the wrong drug, he said.

Eventually everyone will have a full genome that lasts their whole life, and then we get over the issue of having to do tests each time. You just upload your genome from your smartphone. Bingo. Costs collapse.

If the first gains look like a slow English waltz, they will soon accelerate to a fast tarantella. Genomic science is tracking the evolution of the early internet, before it changed the world entirely and forever, and this time Britain is at the forefront.

So my modest proposal for the next prime minister is simple: issue 5bn of genomic bonds; call it infrastructure investment; exempt it from current fiscal spending under a revamped golden rule; grasp the nettle; do it fast.

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Britain's path to economic and national renewal is the genome revolution - The Telegraph