Internal Medicine

LONDON—Sales of bioinformatics tools in Europe hit $310 million in 2004 and are forecast to more than double to $720 million by 2011.

RegeneRx Biophar-maceuticals reported in early August that it had begun a collaboration with the Division of Cardiology at Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C., to study thymosin beta 4 (TB4). The goal is to explore TB4’s ability to treat degenerative muscle diseases that often result in cardiomyopathy—a progressive deterioration and weakening of the heart.

Every so often, it is good for us to challenge the so-called truths that we hold dear, for it is often our defense of these truths that keep us from seeing the advantages around the corner. Until Stanley Prusiner and colleagues elucidated the mechanism of prion replication, few of us could conceive of an infectious disease that could propagate without a nucleic acid intermediate. Thalidomide offers a particularly special example of being a wonder drug that was vilified when its use as an anti-nauseate was linked to birth defects. And yet later still, it has seen a renaissanceas scientists have begun to use it as an effective treatment for cancer when proper precautions are followed.

The conventional approaches used to discover biomarkers that can be used to help us understand disease and assay for its presence or response to drug treatment represent a wonderful start. They involve looking at differential biology at the protein level and trying to see if there are changes, racing to sequence all of the changes, and then going back to the literature or reconciling with one’s own hypotheses to choose which of the changed proteins are really relevant to the clinical question you are asking. Whatever the clinical question, whether it is detection of disease, determining the likelihood of response or an adverse reaction to a drug, you have to choose the right biomarkers and then build reproducible, precise assays.

Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) and Thar Technologies announced an integration of their chromatography data systems to provide “efficient chiral application screening and databasing” to the pharmaceutical development process. According to Michael McBrien, ACD/Labs chromatography software product manager, the new system joins Thar’s SuperChrom software to the ACD/ChromManager, providing customers with complete front- and back-end chromatography support.

SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development organization, announced in July the expansion of its BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases from 18 to 160 organisms. SRI collaborated with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in enlarging the collection to include databases for most eukaryotic and prokaryotic species whose genomes have been sequenced.

Applied Biosystems Group recently launched its expanded polymerase chain reaction (PCR) licensing program, and announced in early July that the first licensee in this program would be Carlsbad, Calif.-based Invitrogen Corp. Financial terms of the license were not disclosed.

Structural GenomiX (SGX) recently announced the signing of a three-year, $15-million deal with Bethesda, Md.-based Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics (CFFT) to discover novel therapeutics for the treatment of cystic fibrosis, a genetic pulmonary disease that affects nearly 30,000 people in the United States.

ViroLogic Inc, announced in early July it signed a three-year $4.8 million service agreement with the Schering-Plough Research Institute. Schering-Plough will use ViroLogic assays during Phase III clinical trails for its drug candidate vicriviroc, a potential new entry inhibitor drug for HIV.

The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) recently selected Perlegen Sciences, Inc. to conduct a comparative study of genetic variation among postmenopausal women with coronary heart disease, stroke, or breast cancer. The women are subjects in a 15-year observational study and clinical trial program that includes a component looking at estrogen plus progestin (E+P) therapy. The genetic analysis will investigate whether E+P contributed to incidences of the three diseases.

Late last month Invitrogen added the latest feather to its proteomics cap with the acquisition of BioSource International for $130 million in cash. The deal augments Invitrogen’s fast-growing product lines in the areas of protein and primary antibodies which has been built through the recent acquisitions of Zymed Laboratories and Caltag Laboratories. With BioSource, Invitrogen gains important offerings in kinase and cytokine assay technologies and entry to important new markets such as immunology, oncology and neurodegenerative diseases.

Beckman’s acquisition of Coulter Corporation in October 1997 created the company as it is today, one of the largest providers of diagnostics and life science research products in the industry. Scott Garrett was named CEO of the company in February and recently took time for an exclusive interview with DDN Chief Editor Chris Anderson to share his vision of the industry and Beckman Coulter’s path for the future.