While Roche pours half a bil­lion dol­lars in­to its Covid-19 an­ti­body test, the Swiss com­pa­ny is qui­et­ly beef­ing up the rest of their di­ag­nos­tics arm.

Roche to­day ac­quired Stratos Ge­nomics, a Seat­tle-based de­vel­op­er of a new DNA tech­nol­o­gy de­signed to make ge­net­ic strands more easy to read. Roche said it will use the Stratos tech­nol­o­gy, along­side its ex­ist­ing ef­forts, to de­vel­op a nanopore se­quenc­ing de­vice that can quick­ly and cheap­ly read pa­tients’ DNA in clin­ics to di­ag­no­sis dis­ease and as­sess the risk of de­vel­op­ing one.

Mark Koko­ris

”We are thrilled to join the Roche fam­i­ly, which will al­low us to com­bine our unique Se­quenc­ing by Ex­pan­sion chem­istry with the Roche nanopore se­quencer,” Stratos CEO Mark Koko­ris said in a state­ment.

Though known chiefly for ther­a­peu­tics, Roche has long had a strong — al­most ag­gres­sive — in­ter­est in di­ag­nos­tic se­quenc­ing. In 2012, the com­pa­ny at­tempt­ed a $5.7 bil­lion hos­tile takeover of the se­quenc­ing gi­ant Il­lu­mi­na, go­ing di­rect­ly to share­hold­ers af­ter failed ef­forts to start talks with man­age­ment. At the time, that price tag was a 63% pre­mi­um on Il­lu­mi­na’s stock price. To­day, the com­pa­ny is worth $55 bil­lion.

The same year, Ox­ford Nanopore un­veiled its first dis­pos­able se­quenc­ing de­vice. It promised to used nanopore se­quenc­ing — a process that in­volves draw­ing a long strand of DNA through a tiny or­gan­ic pore with an elec­tri­cal cur­rent — to read DNA for less than $900, a cru­cial step for mak­ing ge­net­ic se­quenc­ing ac­ces­si­ble in a doc­tor’s of­fice. It’s an area in which Roche has long been in­ter­est­ed; the com­pa­ny ac­quired the se­quenc­ing com­pa­ny 454 Life Sci­ences back in 2007 and signed a part­ner­ship with Pa­cif­ic Bio in 2013, though they broke it off 3 years lat­er, set­ting the stage for a failed buy­out by Il­lu­mi­na.

Stratos tries to ex­pand on the tra­di­tion­al nanopore ap­proach with the de­vel­op­ment of a mol­e­cule it calls an “Xpandomer.” This mol­e­cule comes in 4 types — one for each dif­fer­ent DNA base pair. The idea is that be­fore send­ing the strand through a nanopore, these mol­e­cules will bind to it, base by base, and am­pli­fy the sig­nal 50-fold, lead­ing to a more ac­cu­rate read­out.

The com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to op­er­ate in Seat­tle. There is no time­line yet for the com­ple­tion of Roche’s nanopore de­vice.

Bristol Myers Squibb has a new R&D partner, one to which they’re paying a pretty penny to use their discovery platform.

The pharma company is doling out $55 million upfront to Schrödinger $SDGR to work on up to five small molecules, with the potential for $2.7 billion in milestone payments. Schrödinger’s initial targets include HIF-2 alpha and SOS1/KRAS for a type of kidney cancer and KRAS-driven cancers, respectively.

Two biotechs said they got turned away by the FDA on Wednesday, in part due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

North Carolina-based Liquidia Technologies was handed a CRL for its lead pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, citing the need for more CMC data and on-site pre-approval inspections, which the FDA hasn’t been able to conduct due to travel restrictions. The agency also deferred its decision on Revance Therapeutics’ BLA for its frown line treatment, because it needs to inspect the company’s northern California manufacturing facility. The action, Revance emphasized, was not a CRL.