Japanese and U.S. science and technology officials proposed Tuesday that an international consensus be formed rapidly on the release of raw sequence data on the human genome.
The science officials made the proposal at the eighth meeting of a Japan-U.S. joint committee set up under a bilateral science and technology cooperation agreement revised last July.
The committee "appreciates both sides' common stance that such data should be made freely available to scientists everywhere," said a joint communique issued after the one-day meeting in Greenbelt, Md.
Science and Technology Agency chief Hirofumi Nakasone and Neal Lane, assistant to the president for science and technology, cochaired the meeting. Both parties also agreed the two countries will play a key role in promoting protein research and strengthening a human frontier science program established in 1989, Nakasone told a news conference in Washington. Nakasone said Japan will convene an international conference in November with a view to launching a project to clarify all protein functions.
The clarification is expected to help medical treatments for cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
Because it is difficult for countries to individually explicate all proteins made by an estimated 80,000 to more than 100,000 genes, Japan and the United States will cooperate and call on European countries to take part in the project, Nakasone said.
Both parties will later discuss patent standards and other issues regarding results of protein function explication that would be used for developing new pharmaceuticals, he added.