Devgen: Welcome to wormworld

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the more recent organisms to be widely used by biological researchers, but it has already become established in academia as an excellent system to study gene function, many aspects of cell biology, neurobiology and behavior. Devgen N.V. intends to be the flagship of C. elegans as a commercial opportunity, using worms for everything from gene identification and functional characterization to target validation and lead compound discovery.

"We're using nematodes as a technology platform, not just to solve a restricted set of diseases," said CEO Thierry Bogaert. "The way we look at it is that you can use nematodes on the one hand to model specific human diseases, for example polycystic kidney disease, and on the other hand for functional genomics and pathway expansion. The third route is to identify novel small molecule leads within specific pathways or use genetics to identify the mechanism of action of known compounds."...