Silencing is golden: a look at Sigma-Aldrich's strategy

To most of the scientific world, gene-silencing or RNA interference is a promising but high-risk research field. But Sigma-Aldrich is betting on it being its next gravy train.

Through a series of deals - partnerships, investments, licences and acquisitions – the St. Louis, Missouri-based multinational has been building a technology base to be a top supplier to researchers in the field. The bet may be wrong, and the research could prove a dead-end, company officials acknowledge; it could be another "anti-sense" - an earlier gene-therapy idea that went nowhere. But the ride itself is worth it, they say.

 

Already, the RNAi field has been growing so fast that the world market for its lab supplies - mostly specialised reagents - is about $100 million, says Shaf Yousaf, president of Sigma-Aldrich’s Research Biotechnology business unit. "It's very important to us. If RNA-based gene silencing becomes part of the therapeutic process, then within five years it could be half a billion dollars" in lab supplies.

And if it doesn’t? "For us, most of our sales are based on research activity," Shaf says. "And if that research is ineffectual then we make money anyway - just not as much."

So it's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose coin toss - provided the company beats its competitors to the underlying lab technology. And that's what Sigma-Aldrich has been trying to do, through a series of RNAi deals. So far, they include:

• Joining the RNAi Consortium, a group including Harvard, MIT's Broad Institute and other leading research institutions in the field.
• Purchase of a German biotechnology firm, Proligo, that's a major supplier of the raw lab materials for synthesizing RNA. The company also has one of four licenses in the world to a key MIT patent family for synthetic RNA work.
• Acquiring a $2.5 million stake and a $2 million license from Benitec, an Australian-listed biotechnology company with operational headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The company, using RNAi for HIV and hepatitis C research, has key patents in so-called vector-based RNAi delivery - a promising, indirect route that entails injecting DNA to produce RNA inside a cell, rather than synthesizing the RNA in the lab. Benitec has patent rights to key RNAi work at Australia’s national lab, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
• Acquiring a $5 million stake, and licenses, from Oxford BioMedica, an Oxford University spin-out in gene therapy for oncology and neurotherapy. The British company has a unique patent portfolio for what Sigma-Aldrich thinks will become a main tool for RNAi work: using a lentivirus as the vector to begin gene therapy on human cells.