Wellcome and partners to create genetic pool

A new Pounds 28 million collaborative initiative to create a public database of genetic markers was launched this week by the Wellcome Trust and a consortium of ten pharmaceutical companies. The Trust will put Pounds 8.75 million-plus into the project to identify and analyse some 300,000 genetic markers, which could pinpoint why some people are predisposed to certain diseases. The Wellcome's Sanger Centre in Cambridge and four other centres in the US will do the research.