THE PROMISES OF THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

The number of new techniques used in the HGP and the ones that are designed almost on a daily basis is staggering. One has only to spend a few hour in the Webpage of the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnological Information) or at that of the HGP, to understand the wealth of new knowledge being produced by the hour.

Even though the mutations responsible for some arcane diseases have been discovered, no disease has been cured using the results of the HGP.

One big problem that it confronts is with those diseases called complex. Those that depend on the interaction of several genes between them and with the environment. Take for example hypertension.

Each year it causes hundreds of million deaths all over the world. It has been investigated using molecular biology tools since the early nineties. Several labs all over the world were looking for the mutation that causes it. Then they switched to the genes and the firs scan implicated more than a 100.

More sophisticated scans indicate that more than 6 chromosomes are somehow, depending on the population implicated in the development of the disease.

Now, one of the promises of the HGP was to develop drugs specifically directed against the genes or proteins responsible for the pathologies, including hypertension. This is the goal of Pharmacogenomics. Now if you have several genes. How many drugs will a person of one particular ethnic origin will have to take to control it?

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