In Invitrogen’s first-quarter conference call, company executives said the company’s RNAi business, which comes from its November 2003 acquisition of Sequitur, is growing.
Although revenue growth was flat for the company’s core genomics business, “our RNAi business is going very strong,” CEO and President Greg Lucier said in the call Thursday. “We are really pleased with the overall Stealth RNAi business and that’s right on track in terms of its performance.”
Daryl Faulkner, senior vice president of global business segments, added that “this is one of the more exciting areas that were getting into. Currently we’re doing normal synthetic RNA oligos as well as the Stealth [RNAi acquired from Sequitur],” he said. “But at the same time we are introducing complementary products for vector introduction of RNAi into cells as well as transfection products.”
Faulkner said the company wanted to both “create an RNAi suite” of products, and apply these technologies to its drug discovery business. “[W]e’re very bullish about this as the year goes on,” he added.
While at the moment, the RNAi business is located in Natick, Mass., where Sequitur was located, and service collaborations that Sequitur had with pharmaceutical companies are ongoing at this site, “at some point” this business “will be integrated into the Madison [Wis.] site” where Invitrogen’s PanVera drug discovery business is located, Lucier said.
Invitrogen acquired Sequitur, which produced stealth RNAi compounds that are essentially siRNAs around 27-mer in length that have been modified so that they will not trigger a cellular interferon response, in order to enhance its lineup of RNAi products (see RNAi News, 11/07/2003).