Chiron Corporation and Sagres Discovery announced that Chiron has acquired Sagres. Sagres, a privately held company headquartered in Davis, Calif., focuses on the discovery and validation of targets with potential application to the development of cancer therapeutics. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

"This is a unique opportunity to advance our goal of building a competitive, balanced pipeline for Chiron," said Kenneth Bair, senior vice president and head of research, Chiron BioPharmaceuticals. "Sagres has a wealth of in vivo validated targets, including kinases and antibodies, that will increase both the quantity and quality of targets available to us for development. With the wealth of targets from Sagres, we expect to be able to maximize the value of our collaboration with Xoma Ltd. and our small molecule drug discovery program for the development and commercialization of new drugs for the treatment of cancer," he said.

"We are delighted to have the technology and drug targets our team has developed over the last several years joined with the resources and talents of Chiron," said Dr. Ali Fattaey, chief scientific officer, Sagres Discovery. "The incredible amount of novel discoveries generated from the Oncogenome has been changing the way we view gene function and cooperation in cancer development, and is refining how we select targets for cancer drug discovery and development. With Chiron, these discoveries now have a fantastic opportunity to be translated into novel drug candidates, and in time, actual drugs that will benefit cancer patients," he added further.

Sagres Discovery technology has created the Oncogenome, a comprehensive assembly of genes that cause cancer. The technology combines gene isolation and in vivo biological validation into one high-throughput process. Through molecular profiling of human disease tissues, clinical relevance is established concurrently with gene discovery and validation. This technology is able to discriminate between those few genetic factors that cause disease (oncogenes and tumour suppressors) and the confounding factors that respond to disease processes. Only genes that cause the cancer phenotype are recovered and downstream effects are specifically excluded.

As a result, the Sagres Discovery approach eliminates significant time- and resource-intensive secondary screening required by most other approaches. This allows Sagres Discovery to advance targets into discovery sooner and with more confidence.