The genomics era brought a wealth of new genes but very little knowledge as to what those genes do or how they might interact.

A Beverly, Mass.-based company called Cell Signaling Technology Inc. hopes to narrow that gap by providing new research tools to help define the mechanisms underlying cell function and disease.

The company's technology is intended to accelerate the discovery and development of therapies for a variety of diseases.

CST's story is an unusual one in a biotech industry that struggles to balance research and development with financing and grants. That's because CST has never raised any money, and it already is profitable.

It started as a department within a reagents company called New England Biolabs Inc. (NEB), also of Beverly. Scientists at NEB conducted research that led to CST's founding.

"They developed some of the first phospho-specific antibodies and commercialized those," said Christopher Bunker, CST's director of business development. "They were immediately hugely successful."

In October 1999, CST became incorporated. It moved into its own facility in April 2000. With a loan from NEB, which has since been paid off, the company got its start until revenues began flowing from reagent sales.

"When I joined we were 15 or 20 people, and now we're about 130," Bunker told BioWorld Today. "The nice thing about our company is we're entirely profitable, all of our internal research programs are funded by retained earnings."

Its products include about 800 to 900 antibodies primarily focused on signaling and kinases and which are most relevant to oncology, but also have potential in the fields of inflammation, metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease and some central nervous system disorders.

In September, the company signed an agreement with Strasbourg, France-based Aventis (now part of Paris-based Sanofi-Aventis Group) to perform a pilot study employing CST's PhosphoScan technology.

"The intention there is we can use the technology, which we developed here, to enable the discovery of biomarkers for kinase drug targets," Bunker said.

The phospho-proteomics technology combines immunoaffinity purification and mass spectroscopy to determine cellular PTK phosphorylation profiles, or TKSignatures. Biomarkers discovered might enable target validation and profiling assays to monitor kinase-targeted therapeutic pharmacodynamics and efficacy.

The company signed a similar agreement in June with London-based AstraZeneca plc, and it expects to soon announce a third agreement that recently was signed, Bunker said.

CST has a two-pronged approach with its technology.

"Now, with this technology we can do biomarker discovery to enable pharma programs to move forward," Bunker said, "And also we're going to look for partnerships that are more on an equal foothold."

The company is looking to entities such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Cancer Institute, or some smaller biotech companies, as possible partners for its own drug discovery programs.

As a profitable company, CST has taken a conservative approach to how it spends money, but Bunker said that has forced the company to focus and choose the best areas in which to invest. All of the company's employees are stakeholders in CST, he said.

CST makes its antibodies in-house and characterizes them with respect to specificity and sensitivity. The company begins production with purification followed by testing on a range of applications, including ELISA, Western blotting, immunoprecipitation, immunocytochemistry, immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry.

In the past year, CST was awarded a patent for motif-specific antibodies, a set of tools for discovering new signaling proteins and how they are regulated. The company also is developing an NIH-funded Internet resource of in vivo protein phosphorylation events, and it is a partner of the Alliance for Cellular Signaling for work modeling signal transduction.

Earlier this year, CST signed a joint marketing and assay-validation agreement with Lincoln, Neb.-based Li-Cor Biosciences. Under the agreement, the companies are validating In-Cell Western cellular imaging assays on Li-Cor's Odyssey Infrared Imaging System using CST's antibody reagents. The agreement includes phospho-specific antibodies to key signaling molecules, such as kinases and apoptosis regulators.

CST also formed an agreement in April for the use and sale of certain reagents with Zeptosens AG, of Witterswil, Switzerland.