Proteomics the really big wave
And to the surprise of many, it now appears that the gene count comes in at a mere 30,000 to 40,000 instead of the previously estimated 100,000. The revised numbers have prompted some to say that developing gene-based drugs will come easier than previously thought.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Winton Gibbons, a financial analyst at William Blair & Company, said he believed having fewer genes was good news. We get to drugs and profits faster than if we have to sort through 100,000 genes, he said.
Perhaps. But as I see it, you can drown in 3 feet of water just as easily as you can in the whole ocean.
Gibbons's comment seems to underscore one of the public's biggest misconceptions about genomics that genes equal drugs. As we all know, most drugs are targeted to proteins. And because most genes code for more than one protein, the number of potential drug targets is far greater than the number of individual genes.
The number of genes to sort through isn'st really the issue, the number of proteins is. And because proteins are so much more complex than genes, sorting through them is orders of magnitude more difficult. For an industry that's barely begun to address the IT challenges that have come with genomics, it really doesn'st matter if it's 30,000 genes or 100,000 it's enough proteins to drown in either way.
So let's stop fretting over how few genes separate us from the roundworm, and be thankful that the surplus ones allow us to develop increasingly complex computing solutions to sort through it all. We'sre going to need them. Because the reality is, in fact, that the onslaught of genomics data is just the beginning. Proteomics is the next big wave on the not-so-distant horizon. And compared to genomics, proteomics is a tsunami.