NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical division of Merck KGaA, today said that it has spun out a bioinformatics firm, Quartz Bio, from its Entrepreneur Partnership Program launched earlier this year.
Quartz Bio will be located in the Blue Box offices of FONGIT, a start-up accelerator located in Geneva, Switzerland. It will offer biomarker data management and exploratory biomarker analysis services to the pharmaceutical industry.
Merck Serono said that it intends to use the services provided by Quartz Bio and is planning work orders amounting to around €2 million (US$2.5 million) for the next two or three years.
"An increasing number of pharmaceutical companies are integrating a stratified medicine approach in their drug development process in order to predict how patients will respond to a specific therapy," Jérôme Wojcik, founder and CEO of Quartz Bio, said in a statement. "Biomarker analyses are at the heart of stratified medicine, and we believe that Quartz Bio's flexible and highly specialized services will bring added value to pharmaceutical companies for the development of new drugs."