Invitrogen has acquired fellow US firm Sequitur in a move that bolsters its technology portfolio in RNA interference (RNAi).

RNAi is used in life science research, and may hold promise as a therapeutic, as it offers a simple method to silence the expression of a gene involved in a biological pathway. The companies did not disclose financial terms.

Claude Benchimol, Invitrogen's senior vice president of R&D, said that one of the primary attractions for the company was Sequitur's Stealth technology, which is based on proprietary chemically-modified synthetic RNAi molecules that, it is claimed, have potency advantages over conventional short-interfering RNA (siRNA) sequences.

He noted that the Stealth RNAi can be combined with Invitrogen's Lipofectamine reagents - a cationic lipid used to achieve high transfection efficiencies and protein expression levels - to create "the most stable, synthetic RNAi and deliver it effectively into cells for research or therapeutics."

The acquisition also strengthens Invitrogen's services offering. Sequitur uses its Stealth RNAi to provide target discovery and validation services and has collaborative agreements with a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

So far this year, the RNAi sector has seen Alnylam merge with Germany's Ribopharma and forge an alliance with Merck & Co, Qiagen forge an alliance with Intradigm, Genta acquire Salus Therapeutics and Calbatech buy Molecula Research Laboratories.