The high road to success: how investing in ethics enhances corporate objectives

There is a growing gap between the tidal wave of information emerging from the Human Genome Project and other molecular biology initiatives, and the clinical research needed to transform these discoveries into new diagnostics and therapeutics. While genomics-based technologies are being rapidly integrated into pharmaceutical R&D, many steps in the experimental process are still reliant on traditional surrogate model systems whose predictive power about human disease is incomplete or inaccurate. There is a growing trend underway in the research community to introduce actual human disease understanding as early as possible into discovery, thereby improving accuracy of results throughout the R&D continuum. Such an approach (known as clinical genomics: the large scale study of genes in the context of actual human disease) requires the availability of large quantities of ethically and legally sourced, high-quality human tissues with associated clinical information.Heretofore, no source could meet all of these requirements. Ardais Corporation was the first to address this need by pioneering a systematized, standardized network for the collection, processing, dissemination and research application of human tissue and associated clinical information, all of which rest on the highest ethical standards. Based on a novel model of collaboration between industry and the academic/medical community, Ardais has created procedures, structures, technologies, and information tools that collectively compromise a new paradigm in the application of human disease to biomedical research. Ardais now serves as a clinical genomics resource to dozens of academic researchers and biopharmaceutical companies, providing products and services to accelerate and improve drug discovery and development.