BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Opening up Rosetta

April 9, 2009 7:00 AM UTC

Merck & Co. Inc.'s soon-to-be shuttered Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc. unit is to be reborn as Sage, a not-for-profit institute that aims to provide precompetitive open access to the pharma's integrative genomics data set. This development takes on added significance now that newly published experiments help to validate Rosetta's intensive computational approach to metabolic disease target identification.

The mouse study in Nature Genetics shows that eight proteins involved in various aspects of metabolism and immunity could potentially be targeted to treat obesity and dyslipidemia.1 The paper makes the most compelling case yet for the Rosetta approach, which involves predicting key genetic players in disease by sifting through massive sets of gene expression, protein-protein interactions, SNPs and quantifiable physiological traits data...