St. Louis’s SAGE
Labs has a radical
new way to build a
better rat for
scientific study.
The 95,000 Lab RaTs by AdAm bluestein
photoGr Aph S by
SAVErIo trUGLIA
In the sprawlIng flatlands
west of St. Louis, in a nondescript
brown building on an industrial
cul-de-sac lined with other bland
offices, the headquarters of SAGE
Labs blends right in. That’s the
point. “Given some of the sensitiv-ities around animal research, we
try to keep a low profile around
location,” says Phil Simmons,
SAGE’s manager of marketing
and business development.
Inside, save for a modest
molecular-biology lab taking up
part of the space, SAGE looks like
any other startup—a fridge full
of Cokes, a pot of bad coffee, and
a couple dozen young employees
with a sometimes alarming
enthusiasm for the company’s
creation. But as with its main
product, there’s more to SAGE HQ
When genetically
engineered, the
Long Evans Hooded
rat (center) and the
Sprague Bawleys may
help cure cancer. Not
bad for a rodent.
than meets the eye. Behind a very
secure wall that serves as a barrier against germs and unwanted
visitors, a 22,000-square-foot
vivarium houses a colony of beady-eyed inhabitants that represent
the culmination of 20-plus years
of research in genomics and
genetic engineering—and, perhaps, a key to understanding
and curing some of humanity’s
most vexing ailments.
SAGE, an acronym for Sigma
Advanced Genetic Engineering,
is in fact no regular startup,
but a recently created initiative
of St. Louis–based Sigma-Aldrich,
the world’s largest supplier of
research chemicals, which had
worldwide sales of $2.3 billion in
2010. SAGE will happily sell you a
genetically modified mouse, but
you can get those for a dime a
dozen (actually, $20 or so for an
unmodified off-the-shelf model)
elsewhere. SAGE’s killer app is
its gene-tweaked rat, which costs
considerably more—$445 per
animal for catalog models and
up to $95,000 for a built-to-order
pair. Customers in academia
and Big Pharma are lining up,
hoping to use the rats to attack
everything from autism to cancer
to Parkinson’s disease.
a stylIzed rat logo graces the
business cards of SAGE’s 35
employees. “We’re proud to be
working with animals,” says product development manager Kristen
Bettinger. The ads the company
runs in scientific journals
feature a rat silhouette mowed,
crop-circle style, into a cornfield.
The copy reads: you aren’t
imagining things. knockout
rats are finally here.
