Case Study: GenomeQuest Professional Services enables confidential portfolio examination for business acquisition
Deadlines and Decisions Based on Unknown Sequences
A multi-national manufacturer of bio-industrial goods needed to evaluate the confidential sequence portfolio belonging to a a potential acquisition target company. The acquisition target company is naturally unwilling to disclose the content of their sequence portfolio for any reason. However, the larger company's due diligence process required a comprehensive appraisal of the target company's sequence portfolio, including similarity comparisons against existing patented sequences as well as the larger company's own proprietary sequence collections.
GenomeQuest Professional Services provided two key services under a four-day deadline determined by the legal and financial circumstances of the proposed transaction. First, GenomeQuest arranged secure transport and confidential receipt of the involved companies' sequence portfolios so that a comparative analysis could be performed without mutual or unilateral sequence data disclosure between the companies. Second, GenomeQuest performed the actual comparative analysis to produce the information needed by both parties to make informed decisions about the proposed transaction.
Meeting the tight deadline for the project, GenomeQuest Professional Services provided a summary sequence comparison report that provided all the information needed by the parties to the proposed transaction. The actual report consisted of a statistical summary of portfolio relatedness only. It contained no sequence data or sequence identification information and therefore also complied with the critical confidentiality requirements of the project.