By Debbie Strickland

SEQ Ltd. signed up a second big pharma underwriter for development of its DNA sequencing technology, which, according to the company, is the only commercial effort using single-molecule sequencing.

Zeneca Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Wilmington, Del., agreed to provide an undisclosed amount of funding that will allow SEQ to "roughly double the size of the research effort we have under way in single-molecule sequencing," said Richard Horan, SEQ's president and CEO.

Currently at 12 employees, the Princeton, N.J., company plans to boost its work force to 25 and to move to a new Princeton-area facility by the end of the year.

Once SEQ's sequencing services come on line, Zeneca will have access to them on preferential terms. Zeneca also gained an option to purchase a "significant" equity interest in SEQ. Further terms were not disclosed.

SEQ's technology complements Zeneca's other biotechnology collaborations and could "expedite the discovery of drug therapies from our disease gene hunting collaborations with the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University [in Oxford, U.K.]," said Graham Boulnois, senior vice president for discovery research at Zeneca.

The deal's structure is similar to that of the agreement signed in 1995 between SEQ and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., of New York. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 14, 1995, p. 1.)

Now at a stage of "advanced research," SEQ's system could eventually produce a thousand-fold improvement in sequencing throughput, said Horan.

"We're hopeful that development in the labs in the next six months will allow us to project commercialization within the next 12 to 18 months," he said. According to the company's corporate overview, the commercialization could occur in the first half of the year 2000, if all goes well in the labs.

The company also is developing a high-throughput screening system for performing biochemical and cell-based assays designed to generate pharmaceutical leads and characterize genes of unknown function. SEQ aims to achieve a hundred-fold increase in screening throughput compared to current-generation technology. The sequencing and screening system are both fluorescence-based. *