http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/jan/28/venter-longevity-newborns/
By Gary Robbins
Jan. 28, 2016
La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has acquired a company that banks cord blood, giving him access to stem cells that are part of his expanding effort to fight disease and extend lifespans.
Venter's Human Longevity, Inc. purchased LifebankUSA, which preserves stem cells that are present in the cord blood of newborns. Scientists are working to use the cells to treat existing and future medical problems.
LifebankUSA also banks placental blood and tissue that contains the potentially useful stem cells. The company was founded by Robert J. Hariri, a stem cell pioneer who also helped Venter to found Human Longevity.
Venter did not disclose how much he paid for LifebankUSA, which is owned by Celgene Cellular Therapeutics. But he said that Human Longevity will soon begin to commercially sequence the genome of newborns.
The announcement represents that latest scientific venture for Venter, the first scientist to use private money to sequence a human genome. In 2013, he opened the $37 million J. Craig Venter Institute at UC San Diego, continuing his work in biomedical research. The following year, he co-founded Human Longevity with the intention of establishing one of the world's largest gene sequencing companies.
Human Longevity expanded in October 2015 with the debut of Human Nucleus, which Venter describes as the most comprehensive service available anywhere for assessing a person's health and their risk for a variety of diseases. Patients undergo everything from full genome sequencing to an analysis of the microbes that live on and in their body. The service can cost up to $50,000.
“It’s an executive physical you can’t get anywhere on the planet,” the 69-year-old Venter told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
When he founded Human Longevity in 2014, Venter said, "It’s time for medicine to change from the way it has evolved over a century or more to becoming fact-based and information drive. Sequencing should be the starting point for everyone. Right now, medicine is practiced by using information that represents the average for a population. That average doesn’t say anything about you, it doesn’t say anything about me. We need to focus on the individual, and we can do that by bringing together the huge information in your genome, your microbes, and in your metabolism."
During that same interview, Hariri said, "Craig pointed out that in the past 10 years the cost of sequencing a genome has gone from $100 million to $1,000. Moore’s Law predicts that sequencing will end up becoming about the cost of the full blood panel that you get during any initial physician screening.
"What’s unique about our approach is that we are saying, ‘Look, gathering genomic sequencing information is only useful if you do it with exceptional data collection around phenotype. What are the physical, biological, and chemical characteristics that you can associate to that sequence, to that code? Once that’s in place, I guarantee that there will be apps on smartphones that will let people know their genome, their metabolome, their microbiome.
"They’ll use this to decide what foods to eat or control things like irritable bowel syndrome or Chrohn’s diease. You’re going to be surprised by how fast it all happens. I guarantee it will happen in the next 10 years, probably within the next five ... I would argue that this could become the new alternative for physical exam."
By Gary Robbins
Jan. 28, 2016
La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has acquired a company that banks cord blood, giving him access to stem cells that are part of his expanding effort to fight disease and extend lifespans.
Venter's Human Longevity, Inc. purchased LifebankUSA, which preserves stem cells that are present in the cord blood of newborns. Scientists are working to use the cells to treat existing and future medical problems.
LifebankUSA also banks placental blood and tissue that contains the potentially useful stem cells. The company was founded by Robert J. Hariri, a stem cell pioneer who also helped Venter to found Human Longevity.
Venter did not disclose how much he paid for LifebankUSA, which is owned by Celgene Cellular Therapeutics. But he said that Human Longevity will soon begin to commercially sequence the genome of newborns.
The announcement represents that latest scientific venture for Venter, the first scientist to use private money to sequence a human genome. In 2013, he opened the $37 million J. Craig Venter Institute at UC San Diego, continuing his work in biomedical research. The following year, he co-founded Human Longevity with the intention of establishing one of the world's largest gene sequencing companies.
Human Longevity expanded in October 2015 with the debut of Human Nucleus, which Venter describes as the most comprehensive service available anywhere for assessing a person's health and their risk for a variety of diseases. Patients undergo everything from full genome sequencing to an analysis of the microbes that live on and in their body. The service can cost up to $50,000.
“It’s an executive physical you can’t get anywhere on the planet,” the 69-year-old Venter told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
When he founded Human Longevity in 2014, Venter said, "It’s time for medicine to change from the way it has evolved over a century or more to becoming fact-based and information drive. Sequencing should be the starting point for everyone. Right now, medicine is practiced by using information that represents the average for a population. That average doesn’t say anything about you, it doesn’t say anything about me. We need to focus on the individual, and we can do that by bringing together the huge information in your genome, your microbes, and in your metabolism."
During that same interview, Hariri said, "Craig pointed out that in the past 10 years the cost of sequencing a genome has gone from $100 million to $1,000. Moore’s Law predicts that sequencing will end up becoming about the cost of the full blood panel that you get during any initial physician screening.
"What’s unique about our approach is that we are saying, ‘Look, gathering genomic sequencing information is only useful if you do it with exceptional data collection around phenotype. What are the physical, biological, and chemical characteristics that you can associate to that sequence, to that code? Once that’s in place, I guarantee that there will be apps on smartphones that will let people know their genome, their metabolome, their microbiome.
"They’ll use this to decide what foods to eat or control things like irritable bowel syndrome or Chrohn’s diease. You’re going to be surprised by how fast it all happens. I guarantee it will happen in the next 10 years, probably within the next five ... I would argue that this could become the new alternative for physical exam."