By Randall Osborne

West Coast Editor

Aiming to push its "extreme genetics" approach even further and create a clinical genomics powerhouse, Xenon Genetics Inc. signed a deal to buy out Canadian peer RGS Genome Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

The merger is due to close "in the next few days," said Frank Holler, president and CEO of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Xenon, which has databases and drug discovery programs in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and ocular disorders that will be teamed with Montreal-based RGS's programs in epilepsy, schizophrenia and other neurological diseases.

"We have eight disease-related genes, two validated as drug targets," Holler said.

Xenon's "extreme genetics" method involves "the study of rare phenotypes, disorders at the extreme of the phenotype of interest," Holler told BioWorld Today.

"You often don't have the environmental factors influencing your results and, secondly, the rare disorders are usually caused by a single gene," Holler said. "We've trademarked the [extreme genetics] name."

The approach helped Xenon with its discovery of the ABC1 gene, implicated in HDL cholesterol levels. Warner Lambert Co., of Morris Plains, N.J., this spring entered a deal with Xenon focused on cardiovascular disease, pledging US$57.7 million to the Canadian company for a single product. Warner-Lambert is a subsidiary of New York-based Pfizer Inc. The gene discovery was published in Nature Genetics. (See BioWorld Today, Aug. 3, 1999; and May 26, 2000.)

Holler said Xenon also distinguishes itself from competing clinical genomics firms by "focusing on particular disease areas, and bringing the best populations for those areas. We have 19 exclusivity agreements with research institutions, which cover 26 distinct populations around the world. [Other firms] are primarily using a single founder population, and applying it to multiple disease areas."

Tailoring the studied population to the disease of concern has resulted in "more interesting, 'druggable' targets," Holler said.

RGS also brings to Xenon a congenic mouse population, developed during the past eight years and used to study comparisons between mice and humans of genes and gene links to disease.

Holler said the new company has 77 employees, and will be "continuing to add to that number. We now have research facilities in Vancouver and Montreal, and we have an office in Amsterdam to manage our collaborations in Europe."