Major U.K. Genetics Lab Accused Of Misusing African DNA

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Advocates for genomic research in Africa are worried about fallout from a dispute that has roiled the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a major genome research center in Hinxton, U.K. Last year, whistleblowers privately accused Sanger of commercializing a gene chip without proper legal agreements with partner institutions and the consent of the hundreds of African people whose donated DNA was used to develop the chip. "What happened at Sanger was clearly unethical. Full stop," says Jantina de Vries, a bioethicist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who has followed the dispute.

Sanger's troubles have mounted since the beginning of the dispute, which was first made public last month. The institute says it did not commercialize the chips or profit from them, but admits in a statement that its relationship with some African partners has been "disrupted." Stellenbosch University in South Africa has demanded that Sanger return samples. In addition, one whistleblower says she was fired because of the controversy, and a large research team has left the institute and ended a plan to study the genomes of 100,000 Africans.

More broadly, Sanger's mishandling of the matter could erode trust between researchers and African people, setting back genomic research that could benefit them, de Vries says. "The tragedy and the scandal is that the people who will pay the price are Africans."

Genome sequencing can reveal the genetic roots of diseases and offer clues for new drugs and personalized medicine. But whole genome sequencing costs $800 to $1200 per person. Researchers use gene chips as a cheaper shortcut to look at key spots in a person's genome where variation might be expected. The chips can lower the cost to less than $100 per sample, but first they need to be designed based on entire genomes from a given population.

In a $2.2 million deal inked in 2017, Thermo Fisher Scientific made 75,000 gene chips, or microarrays, for Sanger based on African genomic data gathered through several collaborations. Working with a unit of the Medical Research Council in Entebbe, Uganda, researchers at Sanger sequenced nearly 2100 genomes of Ugandan people. To capture more of the variation on the continent, they partnered with other institutions in Africa to sequence the genomes of about 400 more people.

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