SBI, Quest Team to Apply Pharmacogenomics to Drug And Healthcare Research

SAN DIEGO--Quest Diagnostics of Teterboro, N.J., and Structural Bioinformatics here announced a strategic alliance regarding the application of structural pharmacogenomics to clinical testing and pharmaceutical research. Structural Bioinformatics will extend existing and generate new proprietary target-specific structural variant database modules for a number of therapeutic targets based on Quest's clinical sequence databases. These modules will permit modeling of structurally variant proteins to facilitate design and identification of best-in-class drug compounds, according to the two companies. The databases will be jointly offered under the QSVdBase name by both companies for licensing to the pharmaceutical industry within the year. Patrick Hess, director of biotechnology affairs at Quest's Nichols Institute, said, "The structural variant databases generated from our genotyping databases should provide a fertile new source of information helpful in the design of new antiviral compounds using the structure-based drug discovery approach pioneered by Structural Bioinformatics."