By Mary Welch

LJL BioSystems Inc. has formed the Genomics Science Group within the company aimed at extending its high-throughput screening solutions to the genotyping of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).

"We started this group so that our customers could use our machines to score SNPs," said Enal Razvi, director of business development for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. "What we are trying to solve is the same problem that companies are facing with high-throughput screening [HTS] - the bottleneck in scoring accurate robust samples in a cost-effective way."

The company develops, produces and markets instruments and consumables to accelerate and enhance the drug discovery process. Its proprietary technology platform was designed to address many of the limitations associated with the current products for the HTS market, said Larry Tannenbaum, chief financial officer and senior vice president at LJL.

"I don't think they started out going after the SNP market. It was serendipity," said Robert Olan, an analyst with Hambrecht & Quist LLC in New York. "Someone just sort of thought that maybe the technology could be used for SNP detection. It remains to be seen what exactly this group will pursue. Right now it's more customer-driven. So I think the company will go back after talking with its initial customers and figure out where the money is and what they want to do. It's still in the early stages but SNPs are a hot area."

The company's efforts in scoring SNPs is similar to its drug discovery market. "They both require high throughput and low cost per data point, just like our HTS users," Tannenbaum said.

The company introduced its first HTS product in 1988, and LJL already has shipped its Analyst system for use in SNP analyses to several genomics customers, including the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Mass., and Exelixis Pharmaceuticals, of South San Francisco. Analyst is a four-mode analyzer designed to accommodate high-throughput screening efforts common in assessing compound libraries for drug candidates.

The company decided to start the genomics group because, "whenever we would go to a conference, pharma companies would talk about the need for a robust method of genotyping," Razvi said. "It's useless unless companies could use it on a commercial scale. We can do the scoring in a much less expensive fashion and we have a 99 percent success rate of finding a robust score."

SNPs are molecular signatures in the genome that contribute to genetic variety. By identifying SNPs in a patient population, researchers can be more specific in their drug discovery efforts and reduce the risk of clinical failure by better defining the patient population, Olan said.

"LJL has the technology where after you've identified a SNP, they'll go in, look and validate the SNP in a less costly way," Olan said. "The going rate is $1 per SNP and if you're looking at a patient population of 1,000 people with 50 SNPs per person, that's prohibitive. LJL has the processes to analyze in a more straightforward manner with less steps than some of the others doing the same thing."

It is too early to tell if the group will be spun off as a separate entity, Tannenbaum said. "It's too soon but we will be looking at the revenues and expenses and we're thinking about it as a profit center," he said. "We're just looking at the market and seeing how it responds to our services."