Relationship marketing firm Siren Interactive, whose specialty is rare disease, has been acquired, not by another agency that wants in on this burgeoning niche, but by Dohmen Life Science Services, which provides outsourced business services to life science firms. Dohmen says it’s looking to Siren to build up its patient-communication capabilities for those clients, the companies said yesterday.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Wendy White, founder and CEO of 15-year old Siren, will join Dohmen as SVP of its rare-disease segment, the companies reported. White was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Siren reported flat revenues for 2013 in the $5 million to $10 million range, with an agency headcount of 34, vs. 36 in 2012.

The acquisition of Siren advances Dohmen’s direct-to-patient service platform, designed to help biopharma and med-tech firms interactively target small patient populations, Cynthia LaConte, Dohman CEO, told MM&M.

“We are serving life science innovators that want to start a dialogue with patients—sometimes as early as development [stage]—with an integrated, patient-centric approach that is rooted in a care model in which the patient is an active participant,” she explained, adding that the agency brings “unique capabilities to the care model we have been assembling for a few years now: the capability of initiating the conversation with the patient and continuing that conversation throughout the patient’s care cycle.”

Siren, founded by White (whose daughter has a rare disease) in 1999, has one of the longest agency track records in the orphan space. Of late, the firm has sought to expand beyond its mainstay concentration. The shop added seven new clients in 2013, lending strategic support to large pharma companies setting up rare-disease units.

Staffers of the Chicago-based agency will be welcomed to Dohmen’s growing outsourced service business, LaConte said. But the future of the Siren Interactive brand remains undecided at the Dohmen Company subsidiary. “We have yet to establish if we will be branding micro sites,” LaConte said.