Manteia Predictive Medicine

"Manteia Predictive Medicine S.A." (initially incorporated under the name "GenInEx S.A.") was a start-up company created in November 2000 as a spin-off of Serono, a Swiss based biotechnology company, now part of Merck-Serono, and private founders^[1]. Its aim was to provide preventive and curative treatment guidelines for common and complex diseases. These guidelines were envisaged as composed of two parts:

• a "personal genome card" containing the entire genome sequence of the person holding the card,
• an Internet link to a treatment database to be interrogated at the doctor's practice.

The company was basing its strategy on the so called "DNA colony sequencing" technology, a proprietary massive parallel sequencing technology whose development had been initiated in late 1996 at Glaxo-Welcome's Geneva Biomedical Research Institute (GBRI), by Dr Pascal Mayer and Dr Laurent Farinelli. This work has been protected by several patents and patents applications ^[2], publications ^[3][4] and invited oral communications at international conferences from 1998 to 2001^{[5][6][7][8][9]}.

By the end of 2003, while the company was progressing along its plans towards realizing an industrial instrument capable of sequencing a complete human genome in approximatively 24h, strategic considerations led the main shareholder (Serono) to sell Manteia's technology to UK based "Solexa Ltd", now part of Illumina (company)^[10][11], and to shut down Manteia's operations.

1. ^ Pascal Mayer, Francisco Rubio-Sandi, Daniel Valtueña-Maistre, Laurent Farinelli, Gerardo Turcatti, see Numéro d'enregistrement:CH-550.1.020.166-8 Registre du commerce du Canton de Vaud, Switzerland
2. ^ patents WO 9844151, WO 9844152, WO 0018957, WO 0246456, WO 03074734
3. ^ "Solid phase DNA amplification: characterisation of primer attachment and amplification mechanisms." C. Adessi, G. Matton, G. Ayala, G. Turcatti, P. Mayer, J.J. Mermod and E. Kawashima. Nucleic Acid Research (2000), 28, e87
4. ^ "Solid Phase DNA Amplification: A Simple Monte Carlo Lattice Model",Jean-Francois Mercier, Gary W. Slater, and Pascal Mayer, Biophys J. 2003 October; 85(4): 2075–2086.
5. ^ “A very large scale, high throughput and low cost DNA sequencing method based on a new 2-dimensional DNA auto-patterning process”,P. Mayer, L. Farinelli, G. Matton, C. Adessi, G. Turcatti, J.J. Mermod, E. Kawashima, presented at the Fifth International Automation in Mapping and DNA Sequencing Conference, St. Louis (MI,USA), October 7–10, 1998, invited presentation.
6. ^ “High density DNA arrays obtained by a new autopatterning process”, P. Mayer, at the Human Genome Organization Workshop on DNA arrays, Tartu Estonia, May 23-26th, 1999, invited presentation, and at the GBM99 fall meeting of the german society for biochemistry and molecular biology, Hamburg, Germany, September 6-8th, 1999, invited presentation
7. ^ "Genomic information extraction using massively parallel sequencing approaches on self-forming DNA microchips", P. Mayer, at the Eurobiochips 2000 IBC conference, Hamburg, Germany June 5-7th, 2000. Invited presentation
8. ^ “Self-forming DNA micro-arrays and their applications to genomics”, P. Mayer, invited presentation at Nanotech 2000 conference, Montreux, Switzerland, November 26-30th, 2000
9. ^ “DNA sequencing on self-forming micro-arrays: towards 1 milion bases/second/setup”, P. Mayer, invited presentation at the Nanotech2001 conference, Montreux, Switzerland, November 27-29th, 2001
10. ^ http://www.illumina.com/technology/solexa_technology.ilmn
11. ^ Shendure J. & Hanlee J. (2008) Nature Biotechnology vol26 p1135-1145, " Illumina Genome Analyzer"