Orchid BioSciences (Princeton, NJ) announced a deal in July to score the prevalence of 60,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified by the SNP consortium. By performing 7.2 million SNP genotypes, Orchid will determine the allelic frequency of the SNPs from 120 patients of diverse ethnicity—information that the consortium will make publicly available as it emerges. Pharmaceutical companies will be able to use this data to see whether a particular SNP is rare, uniform across ethnicities, or prevalent in one particular group. “This set of SNPs, with this frequency data, will serve as the backbone for the high density SNP map and really serve as a prerequisite for identifying medically useful SNPs,” says Dale Pfost, Orchid's president and CEO. Financial details were not disclosed; however, the commercial opportunity for Orchid, according to Pfost, is to format the SNPs and produce kits of content-rich SNP panels ready for pharmaceutical and medical research correlating SNPs with certain diseases and responses to drugs.