Manteia Predictive Medicine S.A. (initially incorporated under the name "GenInEx S.A.") was a start-up company created in November 2000 as a spin-off of
Serono
Serono was a biotechnology company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It was acquired by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 2006. The company was founded as the Serono Pharmacological Institute by Cesare Serono in 1906 in Rome, It ...
, a Swiss-based biotechnology company, now part of Merck-Serono, by private founders. Its aim was to provide preventive and curative treatment guidelines for common and complex diseases. These guidelines were envisaged as composed of two parts:
* a "personal genome card" containing the entire
genome
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding g ...
sequence of the person holding the card
* an Internet link to a treatment database to be referenced by doctors
The company was basing its strategy on the development of so-called "DNA colony sequencing" technology (now commercialized by
Illumina), its proprietary
massive parallel sequencing Massive parallel sequencing or massively parallel sequencing is any of several high-throughput approaches to DNA sequencing using the concept of massively parallel processing; it is also called next-generation sequencing (NGS) or second-generation s ...
technology whose development had been initiated in late 1996 at Glaxo-Welcome's Geneva Biomedical Research Institute (GBRI), by
Pascal Mayer
Pascal Mayer is a french scientist who was awarded Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2022 for researching paved way for inexpensive and rapid DNA sequencing
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the o ...
and Laurent Farinelli. This work has been protected by several patents and patents applications, publications and was discussed in presentations at international conferences from 1998 to 2001.
By the end of 2003, while the company was progressing along its plans towards realizing an industrial instrument capable of
sequencing a complete human genome in approximately 24 hours, strategic considerations led the main shareholder (
Serono
Serono was a biotechnology company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It was acquired by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 2006. The company was founded as the Serono Pharmacological Institute by Cesare Serono in 1906 in Rome, It ...
) to sell Manteia's colony DNA sequencing technology to UK based Solexa Ltd, now part of
Illumina (company)
Illumina, Inc. is an American biotechnology company, headquartered in San Diego, California. Incorporated on April 1, 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological funct ...
.
[Shendure J. & Hanlee J. (2008) ''Nature Biotechnology'' vol. 26, pp. 1135–1145, "Illumina Genome Analyzer"]
See also
*
Illumina dye sequencing Illumina dye sequencing is a technique used to determine the series of base pairs in DNA, also known as DNA sequencing. The reversible terminated chemistry concept was invented by Bruno Canard and Simon Sarfati at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. I ...
References
{{reflist
DNA sequencing
Biotechnology companies established in 2000
Biotechnology companies of Switzerland
2000 establishments in Switzerland