Regeneron Announces Velocigene Agreement
Monday December 23, 12:05 am ET
Velocigene(TM) Technology Platform Accelerates Scientific Understanding of Gene Function by Rapidly Producing Transgenic and Knock-out Models
TARRYTOWN, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 23, 2002-- Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: REGN - News) announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Serono S.A. (Virt-x: SEO, NYSE: SRA), to use Regeneron's proprietary Velocigene technology platform to provide Serono with knock-out and transgenic mammalian models of gene function.
Velocigene uses a proprietary and high-throughput process to ablate genes (creating gene "knockouts") or introduce extra gene copies (creating "transgenics"), rapidly producing mammalian models for elucidating the function of the altered genes. Regeneron developed Velocigene to "functionize" the large numbers of newly identified genes resulting from the sequencing of the human genome, so as to determine rapidly which of these many genes represent validated therapeutic targets for pharmaceutical drug development.
"Historically, knock-out and transgenic models have proved to be among the most powerful approaches to characterize gene function, understand the biology of disease settings, and prioritize potential therapeutic targets. Producing these models, however, has been among the slowest and most laborious processes used in medical research, requiring very highly-skilled personnel for each step," noted David Valenzuela, Ph. D., Vice President of Functional Genomics and Chief of Velocigene Operations at Regeneron. "Velocigene allows for high-throughput, industrialized production of gene knock-out and transgenic models."
"We have already exploited Velocigene in our internal research efforts, and it has proven ideal for harnessing the information available in the genome to determine gene function on a large scale," added George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., President of Regeneron Research Laboratories and Chief Scientific Officer at Regeneron.
Under the terms of the agreement announced today, Serono will pay Regeneron up to $3 million annually for up to five years. In return Regeneron will use Velocigene to provide knock-out and transgenic models for target genes to be specified by Serono.
About Velocigene
Velocigene allows custom and precise manipulation of very large sequences of DNA to produce a highly customized knock-out of a specified target gene and accelerates the production of knock-out and transgenic expression models without using either positive/negative selection or isogenic DNA. In producing knock-out models, a color or fluorescent marker is substituted in place of the actual gene sequence, allowing for high-resolution visualization of precisely where the gene is active in the body, during normal body functioning, as well as in disease processes. Velocigene uses automated systems for most steps in the process. Thus, Velocigene allows scientists to identify rapidly the physical and biological effects of deleting or over-expressing the target gene.
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