Merck Serono launches Quartz Bio spin-off

Merck Serono has announced the creation of a new spin-off called Quartz Bio, a bioinformatics company that offers specialised services to the pharmaceutical industry in the field of biomarker data analysis.

The company is the second to be created through Merck Serono's Entrepreneur Partnership Program, which was launched in April 2012 to help ensure the continuation of Merck Serono's non-core activities and projects.

Quartz Bio will be headed by bioinformatics expert Jerome Wojcik, leading a specialist team of four scientists, with the firm's activities to be based in Geneva.

Merck Serono will be taking advantage of Quartz Bio's services, as biomarker analysis can greatly facilitate drug development processes by identifying patient profiles that are most responsive to a given treatment.

Francois Naef, chairman of the board of directors of Merck Serono, said: "Highly specialised service companies are essential actors of the drug development process and they are very complementary to the activities and structures of large pharmaceutical companies."

This comes after Merck Serono used its Entrepreneur Partnership Program to launch Prexton Therapeutics, a spin-off company dedicated to developing new Parkinson's disease therapies, in July 2012.