Investment
DSM Venturing, the corporate venturing unit of Royal DSM NV, a nutrition and pharmaceutical materials supply specialist made an equity investment of €2 million in Jurilab Oy, a Finnish company specialising in the discovery of gene-disease associations and their application to healthcare.
This follows investments in Sciona and Integragen, as DSM’s third equity investment in personalised nutrition, one of the emerging business areas identified in the company’s Vision 2010 strategy.
Jurilab specialises in the identification of metabolic disease markers and pathways, drug targets and potential diagnostics in obesity, type II diabetes, dyslipidaemia and hypertension. To date the discovery programmes have resulted in dozens of patent applications covering thousands of disease or trait genes.
This discovery engine builds on Jurilab’s access to the genetically homogeneous East Finland founder population, and a related comprehensive database
About a year ago DSM and Jurilab initiated a joint discovery programme in hypertension. This is expected to feed into DSM’s aim of developing nutritional products and integrated services that fit individual consumers’ genetic profiles and other factors, such as age and lifestyle. Further collaborations are expected to result from this investment.
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