The Reporter: June 1995, Vol.6, No.3
Columbia Donates Genetic Data To Public Domain

In a move that establishes open access to valuable genetic data, Columbia has agreed to place thousands of molecular sequences from its genetic libraries in the public domain. The action will enable any academic or industrial gene researcher to capitalize on the University's genetic findings.

"Columbia could have exercised a proprietary right over its findings and profited as a result," says Michael M. Crow, vice provost. "In this instance, the University decided the public interest was best served by making the research findings available for public use."

Molecular sequences for thousands of gene fragments already exist in a private data bank, but access is limited by commercial restrictions. Proprietary rights over such genetic data has become a topic of hot debate among academic and commercial scientists. With Columbia's contribution, privately held data will be reproduced, expanded, and deposited in the public domain.

"I appreciate the effort Columbia has made and the potential financial losses it incurred to make this possible," says Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health. "The cDNA sequencing project funded by Merck & Co. Inc. will significantly expedite research to understand human genetic diseases and greatly benefit the scientific community."

Through an agreement with the Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Columbia will donate normalized, complementary DNA (cDNA) libraries to LLNL as part of a multi-institutional effort to sequence and map a large fraction of human genes. Columbia's cDNA libraries, developed by Dr. Bento Soares, assistant professor of neurogenetics at P&S, are of particularly high quality and are expected to yield molecular gene sequences for 70 percent of all human genes in less than two years.

"We are excited to contribute to this effort and are particularly pleased that research produced in our laboratories is of high scientific merit," says Dr. Herbert Pardes, vice president for health sciences and dean of the faculty of medicine. "While revenue from our intellectual developments is critically important to the University and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, we felt the greater public interest would be served by making this material available to all scientists."

Columbia's normalized libraries will be arrayed (a procedure whereby each clone of the library is given a unique identification code) by Lawrence Livermore and sequenced at Washington University in St. Louis. Washington University, which received funding from Merck & Co. for this purpose, uses automated techniques for rapid sequencing of DNA. The sequences will be made available freely to any scientist through GenBank, a public data bank established in the 1980s by the NIH, LLNL, and other research organizations. While Lawrence Livermore will provide the arrayed clones initially to Washington University, all interested researchers may obtain the clones, provided that they agree to deposit resulting sequencing data into public data bases.

"The cDNA libraries prepared by Dr. Soares with DOE funding are widely recognized as being perhaps the highest quality libraries in the world," says Dr. David A. Smith, director, Health Effects and Life Sciences Research Division, U.S. Department of Energy. "By donating these cDNA libraries, Columbia has made a major contribution to the worldwide effort to develop a human gene map. This map will provide a resource for medical and scientific advances of the most far-reaching nature."

A cDNA library is an entire collection of all the genes active in a particular cell type or tissue at a given time of development. There are as many kinds of cDNA libraries as there are different cells in the body. Molecular gene sequences derived from such libraries may be of commercial interest for a drug or biotechnology company. If and when the sequence is linked to a disease, the drug development process can begin.

Dr. Soares has developed libraries enriched with rare, hard-to-find cDNAs that should help speed the identification of important or disease-causing genes. The data bank could be built using commercially available cDNA but not with the same efficiency. "Without first-rate cDNA libraries, it would be impossible to accomplish this project efficiently," says Dr. Smith.

The patent-pending method used to create the Columbia cDNA libraries is known as "normalization" and was developed by Dr. Soares and colleagues at Columbia. The method results in a reduction of the number of multicopy cDNAs so it is easier to ferret out rare cDNAs. Dr. Soares and colleagues have been able to reduce by 100-fold the number of high-copy cDNAs in a human infant brain cDNA library. Dr. Soares' work is funded by DOE and NIH as part of the Human Genome Project.

"cDNA libraries are research tools that belong in the public domain because a lot of work has to be done to make these tools useful, " says Dr. Soares. "I believe that by creating these resources and doing it in this way, we will contribute in a very significant way to the arduous task of identifying disease genes. Once that is accomplished we can start working on ways to intervene."