Molecular Response (MRL), a privately held molecular diagnostic services company based in San Diego, Calif., has sold its PDX business unit to Crown Bioscience, a drug discovery and development service company headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.

Crown has acquired MRL's PDX bank of several hundred established models currently available for in vivo pharmacology services and several other models under development, with additional acquisition of 8,000 viable human tumors for model development over the next two years from MRL's viable tumor bank of over 140,000 unique cryopreserved tumor samples, and the ability to further develop models from the wider collection. Crown will assume MRL's San Diego-based PDX service operations, and designate the site as a global center of excellence for translational oncology.

MRL will continue operations as a more focused group, maintaining the “living” tumor bank of over 140,000 tumors that now have been proven and accepted by pharmaceutical partners as a rich source of unique subpopulations of cancer for development of high value therapeutic programs.

MRL also will focus on its TargetX drug discovery and development platform that already has resulted in IND-enabling partnered programs to be announced later in the year. Furthermore, MRL will continue its personalized medicine developmental programs currently in prospective clinical trials with key cancer centers.