National Editor

The government put its money behind toxicogenomics and Paradigm Genetics Inc. came out the winner, with a five-year, $23.8 million contract that the company said would become a foundation for its efforts in agricultural biotechnology and human health.

Melissa Matson, manager of corporate communications for Paradigm, said the contract is "specifically human health-focused," but "all of the skill sets and knowledge that we'll build we're going to be using to leverage into the agricultural and health care spaces."

Wall Street liked it. Although still trading at under $1, Paradigm's stock (NASDAQ:PDGM) jumped 53.1 percent Tuesday, closing at 78 cents, up 27 cents. During the past year, it has traded as high as $7.09.

"There's been a lot of confusion about what Paradigm is, and is doing," Matson said. "To date, we've been very technology oriented, and the technology platform business model is not one that has long-term viability," she added. An "internal strategy revision" has been under way since July, when new President and CEO Heinrich Gugger came aboard. Paradigm let go John Ryals, its previous president and CEO, in February. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 27, 2002.)

The company's new approach is just being firmed up. On Tuesday, Matson told BioWorld Today that "we held a special board meeting today to go through it with them, to get their buy-in and input." Further details of the plan will be made public later this week, she said.

Human health will be "a big focus, but I wouldn't say exclusively that," Matson said.

In the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences contract, Paradigm will use gene expression profiling to measure the physiological effects of a toxicant, drug or pesticide on an organism, using equipment, software and arrays by Agilent Technologies Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif.

Toxicogenomics - an emerging field defined by the National Center for Toxicogenomics (part of the NIEHS) as a discipline that "elucidates how the entire genome is involved in biological responses of organisms exposed to environmental toxicants/stressors" - has it skeptics, Matson acknowledged, since toxicology at one site in an organism can turn out to be beneficial in another.

Figuring out those differences is part of the project, she said.

"The ultimate end is to build a national database of unified information on toxicology so that researchers can get more information," Matson said. That information might be used for designing clinical trials or "pretty much any application you can think of," she added.

"We're not helping to build the database, but we're not just crunching the gene chips, either," she said. "We'll also be doing some analysis."

In October 2001, Paradigm and Agilent entered a multiyear collaboration to commercialize the first whole Arabidopsis thaliana genome microarray for use in gene expression studies, and it was introduced in July. Paradigm also has licensed the Rosetta Resolver Expression Data Analysis System from Kirkland, Wash.-based Rosetta Inpharmatics Inc.

The deals with Agilent and Rosetta refined Paradigm's gene-profiling methods, which will be helpful in the contract with NIEHS, Paradigm said.

Based, like the toxicogenomics center and Paradigm, in Research Triangle Park, N.C., NIEHS is the branch of the National Institutes of Health that conducts and supports research on the environmental causes and triggers of disease.

Paradigm, which launched its human-health division at the start of this year, also has a deal with Virtual Drug Development Inc., of Brentwood, Tenn., for an antibiotic program to treat anthrax and other infections, and a collaborative research agreement with Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., to apply Paradigm's metabolomic platform to drug discovery and development.

Metabolomics uses what Paradigm calls its MetaVantage technology to elucidate the metabolic profile of a cell, tissue or fluid, and then integrates it with data from other genomics analyses using informatics.

With VDDI, "we've been doing biochemical profiling of compounds to help them make better choices as far as lead compounds go," Matson said. "We should be done at the end of the year."