Odyssey of a bio database ends with UCB deal

In the biotech industry, gene databases are among the most valuable assets. Companies trade and licence them, to cement partnerships or raise cash. Thus it is that an announcement of one such licensing deal on 18 October caused twinges of irony among seasoned industry watchers.

The deal seemed unremarkable. Oxford Genome Sciences (UK) Ltd., which designs technologies for the development of therapeutic and diagnostic products, said it agreed to license its genomic database to UCB, a Belgium-based biopharmaceutical company.

The agreement would allow UCB, a publicly traded company on Euronext Brussels, to discover drug targets and biomarkers in humans by using the Oxford Genome Anatomy Project database, or OGAP, which pieces clinical, proteomic, and genomic information together. The projects could improve biomarkers for patient selection, drug response and efficacy monitoring, and the integration of diagnostics into drug development and product launch, according to a release by Oxford Genome Sciences. The database contains over one million peptide sequences from 50 tissues and 60 disease states, mapped to approximately 16,000 genes and over eight million SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms.

But there is a certain irony in UCB taking this license, since it came very close to owning the technology itself only a few years earlier. The OGAP database was owned formerly by Celltech Group plc, the antibody company that UCB acquired in May 2004. Just a month earlier Christian Rohlff acquired the technology and licenses for OGAP from Celltech and founded Oxford Genome Sciences.

The database traces its roots back to Oxford GlycoSciences plc, which Celltech bought in May 2003 and subsequently dismembered. Oxford GlycoSciences began building OGAP in the mid 1990s, finding disease specific proteins and linking them to the genes that encode them.

During the dotcom boom, in June 2001, Oxford GlycoSciences set up a joint venture with the telecoms manufacturer Marconi Group plc, called Confirmant, to provide hosting and management services for proteomics databases. The partners committed GBP 30 million to the venture, but when Celltech took over Oxford GlycoSciences, Confirmant had no customers.

Rohlff tried to stage a management buyout at that point, but could not agree terms. Celltech paid Marconi GBP 4 million to close Confirmant at the end of 2003, and Rohlff subsequently took on the technology and licenses.

There is a pleasing circularity about having UCB as a customer, agrees Rohlff, but he points out, “OGAP has evolved greatly since its origins in Confirmant. The great strength is in combining genomics, SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and proteomics together.”