Life Tech: Adding value to clones
In the post-genomics world, researchers increasingly have free access to information such as gene sequences that both for-profit and not-for-profit entities have obtained at significant trouble and expense. How to make money from sequence information is a cloudy issue. Life Technologies Inc., a research supply company that produces cDNA libraries, is capitalizing on making full-length gene sequences publicly available by piggy-backing its Gateway technology on gene clones that it supplies to researchers.
LTEK (Rockville, Md.) last week announced a sequencing collaboration with Genoscope (Evry, France), a public French research institute focused on genome sequencing. LTEK will provide its library of full-length cDNAs to the institute to sequence. The partners will make the sequence information publicly available, and LTEK will be the worldwide distributor of the gene clones that correspond to the sequence information. LTEK also will review the sequence information before it is released and has the option to file patents on genes before they enter the public domain...