By James Etheridge

BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - IntegraGen said it confirmed the potency of its core technology, GenomeHIP, by taking only three months to identify the location of three genes linked to the early onset of obesity.

The company, based south of Paris at the Génopole, France's national biotechnology science and business park at Evry, will soon discover the genes themselves, CEO Jean-Luc Gerbier told BioWorld International.

"The region concerned is very small," he said. "Now that we know where they are, it will not take us long to identify the genes."

Gerbier said the results "demonstrate the superiority of our proprietary GenomeHIP platform. Our technology represents a real breakthrough, providing insights into the analysis of genetic diseases and opening up new perspectives for the prevention and treatment of complex diseases."

IntegraGen uses GenomeHIP (Genome Hybrid Identity Profiling) to discover genes associated with a number of diseases. The technology was developed by the French National Genotyping Center, which spawned IntegraGen in July 2000 and granted it an exclusive license for the technology.

Combined with bioinformatics techniques, GenomeHIP is designed to discover the genes associated with genetic diseases. GenomeHIP compares the genomes of family members suffering from the same disease, selecting and scoring all the identical regions by descent between the genomes.

For the identification of the first three loci, the company applied its linkage mapping technology to 117 sibling pairs of obese patients in Europe (234 individuals in all), the company said. It is concentrating on obesity in children because the number of other possible factors, such as environment and lifestyle, is more limited than in adults.

In October, the company signed agreements with two German universities, Marburg and Heidelberg, granting it access to DNA collections for families characterized by a high incidence of obesity and Type II diabetes, respectively. Gerbier said the company's strategy would be to find a pharmaceutical partner to co-develop future drug candidates.