IF THE big drug companies won’t develop treatments for rare diseases, why not do it yourself? That, essentially, is what Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bathesda, Maryland, proposed to researchers at the meeting in Australia.
He announced a chemical genomics project that will allow academics to carry out the first stages of drug development as part of their existing research. The project, which he expects to be funded by the US National Institutes of Health from October, will involve the creation of regional centres in the US that will be able to test the…
