AHP's private screening

American Home Products Corp. hopes its database deals with both Incyte Genomics Inc. and Celera Genomics Group will leapfrog the sequence data, and more importantly gene data, available through public efforts. However, with a smaller scale high throughput screening (HTS) effort than other big pharma companies, the challenge for AHP is target selection and management.

AHP's Wyeth-Ayerst subsidiary (Radnor, Penn.) established a genomics program in 1999 using public sequence information. According to Charlie Richard, assistant vice president of genomics at Wyeth-Ayerst, the company made the investment in INCY's and CRA's databases "because notification of available genes comes earlier" than from the public database, and for the genomic width and depth offered by the private databases. ...