Biobank UK, GSK and RMC are collaborating on large-scale gene sequencing.

Biobank has announced that it will work with GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK) and Regenerative Meta Pharmaceuticals (RGC) to sequence the genome of 500,000 volunteer participants owned by the bank;
genetic evidence provides a clear link between genes and diseases, revolutioning scientific discovery and drug development in recent years.
Ninety per cent of the potential drugs currently entering clinical trials fail to prove the necessary efficiency and safety and thus fail to reach the patient stage of use, mostly because of a failure to fully understand the link between drug bio-targets and human diseases.
comparative studies have found that the use of human genetic evidence can greatly improve the success rate of drug development.
Biobank has the world's richest health resources.
more than a decade, the UK government and the Charity Drug Research Fund have invested more than 200 million pounds in it, collecting information and samples from 500,000 volunteers and guaranteeing that data provided to researchers will not be used to identify them.
initial funding for the partnership, funded by the RDC and GSK, plans to sequence the first 50,000 samples by the end of 2017.
estimates that sequencing all 500,000 volunteer samples in the future will cost 150 million pounds and take three to five years.
GSK and RMC have nine months exclusive access to the resulting genetic sequencing data, which will then be placed on the UK Biobank database and will eventually be open to more scientists and scientific organisations;
Rory Collins, chief investigator at biobank UK and professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University, said: "It is expected that the scheme will open the door to the rapid production of new drugs and will enable Biobank UK to provide more help for health-related research.
, president of research and development at GSK, said: "The development of human genomics has profoundly changed our understanding of human biology and is now in a new era of drug discovery.
with the RMC, we are able to enrich this resource and provide potential new opportunities for companies like GSK to develop new drugs.
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