Two ends against the middle

Although Chiron Corp.'s acquisition of Sagres Discovery Inc. doesn't remedy its thin clinical pipeline in cancer, CHIR thinks the deal lays the foundation for a renewable internal source of oncology compounds. In addition, Sagres' approach to target discovery is opposite that of CHIR and other companies that use expression data to infer whether a gene may be a good target.

Sagres' high throughput Oncogenome technology uses a retrovirus that integrates randomly into a genome and up-regulates genes in mice. The genes that cause cancer are then cloned and Sagres uses the Celera Discovery System (CDS) database of genome and biological data sets and computational tools to identify the human orthologs. ...