Pfizer and GenomeQuest collaborate and publish in Nature Biotech
Pfizer Inc, founded in 1849, is dedicated to better health and greater access to healthcare for people and their valued animals.
Pfizer IP attorney Guillaime Dufresne together with a research physician Laszlo Takacz and computational biologist Manuel Duval anticipated the complexity of large scale biosequence patent screening using biological search methods based on homology, a measure of evolutionary similarity and not identity, the method used to file patent claims for DNA and protein sequences. GenomeQuest scientists Jean-Jacques Codani and Henk Heus, having developed sequence comparison tools based on percent identity proposed a solution to Pfizer based on the company's proprietary "KERR" algorithm (tradename: GenePAST).
Together, GenomeQuest and Pfizer applied the technology and published in Nature Biotechnology what is now the seminal paper on percent identity searching to retrieve patent sequence records.
US patent application 20050037371