Virco was a biotech

Biotechnology

Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...

 company located in Mechelen

Mechelen

Mechelen Footnote: Mechelen became known in English as 'Mechlin' from which the adjective 'Mechlinian' is derived...

, Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

. It provides a quantitative phenotype

Phenotype

A phenotype is an organism's observable characteristics or traits: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, behavior, and products of behavior...

 prediction for HIV

HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

 resistance testing. The prediction is achieved by performing a search in a database of genotype-phenotype pairs and matching the mutations in the database with those of the sample of the patient (Nearest neighbor search

Nearest neighbor search

Nearest neighbor search , also known as proximity search, similarity search or closest point search, is an optimization problem for finding closest points in metric spaces. The problem is: given a set S of points in a metric space M and a query point q ∈ M, find the closest point in S to q...

). A phenotype is predicted which provides information on the resistance of the virus to treatment.

History

Virco was founded in 1995 by Rudi Pauwels

Rudi Pauwels

Rudi Pauwels is a Belgian pharmacologist. He studied pharmaceutical sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and obtained a PhD with a dissertation on Development of New Anti-HIV Agents....

 (Rega Institute for Medical Research

Rega Institute for Medical Research

The Rega Institute for Medical Research is a Belgian scientific establishment that is part of the Catholic University of Leuven in central Belgium...

) and Paul Stoffels

Paul Stoffels

Paul Stoffels is a Belgian MD, who studied Medicine at the University of Hasselt and the University of Antwerp . In addition he studied Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium...

 (Janssen Pharmaceutica

Janssen Pharmaceutica

Janssen Pharmaceutica is pharmaceutical company, established in Belgium in 1953 by Paul Janssen. Its headquarters are located in Beerse, in the Campine region of the province of Antwerp, Belgium. It was created not as a subsidiary of a chemical factory but solely with the aim of conducting...

). Over the years the company built up a database on all the possible mutations of the AIDS

AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

 virus and the ways in which drugs reacted to these mutations. The company acted as a partner to other companies such as LabCorporation. LabCorp., and others, sent the blood samples of AIDS patients to Virco, where tests were carried out into the virus's possible resistance to the anti-HIV drugs. On 21 March 2002 the company was acquired by Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson is an American multinational pharmaceutical, medical devices and consumer packaged goods manufacturer founded in 1886. Its common stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the company is listed among the Fortune 500....

.