Vitamins designed just for you

GeneWize says capsules help cut genetic risks

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 2, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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A new company has started selling personalized vitamins meant to counter the foibles of DNA - not just anyone's DNA, but your own.

GeneWize Life Sciences vows to achieve "Genetic Harmony" in its customers, who, for about $100 a month, can get vitamin capsules just for them - for their genetic risks for, say, heart attacks, breast cancer or muscular dystrophy.

Geneticists who've examined the science have some words of praise for the approach, but wonder if the vitamins will deliver the promised safeguards.

If it works, it would be one of the first widespread benefits of the heady excitement of 2003, when the 25,000 or so genes in the human genome were first sequenced, and scientists spoke in glowing terms of the potential to counter disease in the future.

It works like this:

Potential customers do their own cheek swabs to collect DNA, then store the swab in a kit and send it into the GeneWize lab.

Some of that DNA is examined, in particular 12 of the 25,000 genes that make up the long DNA molecule. Analysts search for breaks in the normal genetic pattern in certain genes that are connected to health and disease.

The base pairs on the gene of the double-helix-shaped DNA send signals to amino acids to build proteins.

If the base pairs are out of sequence just a little bit on certain genes, it could foul things up - not necessarily a great deal, but enough to make the person more vulnerable to certain diseases.

An abnormal pattern in a person's gene, called a polymorphism, might be shared by 1 percent or 2 percent or 5 percent of the rest of the population.

In those cases, the gene can signal the body to make too much, or too little, or the wrong kind of a protein that is key to promoting or protecting against a malady.

GeneWize officials say their approach can identify who needs, say, more heart-healthy folic acid and add that to tablets those people take.

Multiply that personalized tactic by a dozen or more, and each customer has a vitamin that is unlike those being swallowed by 99 percent of the other customers.

But would it really work?

David Patterson, president of the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at the University of Denver, says maybe, maybe not.

"They picked a reasonable set of genes . . . they got it sort of right," said Patterson, whose institute was the first to sequence completely the genes on Chromosome 21. "And their methods would certainly detect the things they said they would detect.

"But whether or not that would serve as a basis for a meaningful therapy . . . that's what I'm concerned about."

The trouble is that there are often a couple dozen different genes involved in the give-and- take that leads to a disease, or a person's propensity to contract it, Patterson, a world-renowned geneticist, said.

"They look at a couple of genes important for folic acid metabolism," Patterson said. "But there are probably 13 or 14 genes in that metabolic system.

"If you don't look at all of them, well, the effect of one or two may not give you the effect you think you're going to get."

GeneWize's parent company is GeneLink, which formed in 1996 and has several patents based on its research and development. Both companies are based in Florida.

GeneLink has developed gene-detection systems for detecting genetic disorders such as Fragile X syndrome, Huntington's disease and myotonic dystrophy.

It has been selling skin care products based on genetics for three years. In 2004, GeneLink announced that its anti-wrinkle skin cream outperformed a placebo in a double-blind study.

GeneWize is using a multilevel marketing approach to sell the vitamins and recruit others to sell. The first salespeople get a cut of the profits earned by people they bring into the fold.

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