Dharmacon announced today an agreement to supply custom siRNA reagents to Bayer. The siRNA reagents supplied to Bayer will be designed using Dharmacon's proprietary SMARTselection and SMARTpool technologies and will be used by Bayer to accelerate the company's target validation and basic drug development research.

"We chose Dharmacon's siRNA reagents because we can be confident that they will deliver the highly functional and specific gene silencing we need for our drug discovery research," said Haren Vasvada, Ph.D., Director of Molecular Biology at Bayer's Discovery Technologies group.

RNA-interference for drug target identification and validation uses siRNA sequences to silence the expression of specific genes targeted for study. Dharmacon's proprietary technologies create potent and specific gene silencing agents that can accelerate critical investigations across a broad range of biomedical and biological research.

"The selection of Dharmacon's siRNA by Bayer, one of the world's leading health care companies, further demonstrates the advantages of our SMART technologies for pharmaceutical research and drug discovery," said Stephen Scaringe, Dharmacon founder and chief scientific officer. "Our products uniquely enable the rapid, high throughput research that leading pharmaceutical researchers demand."

Dharmacon is the world's leading provider of innovative RNA, small interfering RNA (siRNA) and related RNA-interference (RNAi) products and technologies to the life sciences industry. Founded in 1995, Dharmacon discovered and commercialized 2'-ACE, a novel, highly productive chemical strategy for RNA synthesis.