UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and US biotech Regeneron Pharmaceuticals are investing in a gene sequencing project that uses anonymous patient data held by the UK Biobank. The initiative, said Regeneron, will enable researchers to gain valuable insights to support the development of new medicines for a variety of serious and life-threatening diseases.

UK Biobank has been collecting information and samples from 500,000 volunteers during the past 10 years. Regeneron and GSK have committed an undisclosed initial sum to enable the sequencing of the first 50,000 samples, which will be completed before the end of 2017. Sequencing of the full 500,000 samples is expected to take three to five years.

The sequence data will be incorporated back into UK Biobank’s resource and made openly available to the scientific community following a standard nine-month period of exclusivity for GSK and Regeneron. Research findings will also be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Rory Collins, UK Biobank principal investigator and British Heart Foundation professor of medicine & epidemiology at Oxford University, said the initiative will make UK Biobank even more useful for health-related research. “UK government and charity medical research funders have invested about £200 million in UK Biobank. The costs of gene sequencing are falling, but doing it on a large scale involves highly specialized capabilities and is expensive – with an estimated cost of $150 million if all 500,000 participants are sequenced,” he said.

“I believe that we are in a new era of drug discovery because of a fundamental change in our understanding of human biology, driven largely by advances in human genetics. UK Biobank is one of the most important health resources available to scientists today, offering a rich source of information about health and disease,” commented Patrick Vallance, GSK’s president R&D. GSK said more than 60% of targets selected for its drug discovery programs in 2016 are supported by human genetic evidence.

Currently, an estimated 90% of potential medicines entering clinical trials never reach patients, according to Regeneron. Many of these failures are said to be due to an incomplete understanding of the link between the biological target of a drug and human disease. In contrast, medicines developed with human genetic evidence have had substantially higher success rates.