Compugen signs deal with Johnson & Johnson co
The collaboration combines Compugen's discovery capability with Ortho-Clinical Diagnostic's commercialization strengths.
Globes correspondent 8 Jun 05 15:20
Compugen (Nasdaq: CGEN; TASE: CGEN) announced today a collaboration agreement with Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, a Johnson & Johnson company, for the development and commercialization of immunoassay diagnostic markers.
Under the agreement, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics and Compugen will jointly develop diagnostic products based on biomarkers discovered by Compugen. Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics will have worldwide rights for commercialization, with Compugen receiving development milestones and royalties.
During the initial phase of the agreement, Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics will have the right to select up to nine biomarkers for development from Compugen's continuously growing portfolio, with the parties then collaborating on the initial clinical validation of the selected biomarkers.
Under the agreement, successfully validated biomarkers will be developed into products and commercialized by Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, with Compugen receiving milestone payments and license fees for each commercialized biomarker, in addition to revenue-based royalties.
Compugen stated that the collaboration combined its discovery capability and existing candidate portfolio with Ortho-Clinical Diagnostic's global development and commercialization strengths. Compugen president and CEO Mor Amitai called the agreement "an important commercialization opportunity."
Compugen is a drug and diagnostic discovery company incorporating ideas and methods from mathematics, computer science, and physics into biology, chemistry, and medicine. Compugen's discovery process relies on the comprehensive predictive analysis of the human proteome provided by the company's LEADS platform. The results of this analysis are utilized with a variety of discovery engines, each designed to identify novel proteins with specific desired characteristics from the vast number predicted by the discovery process.
The company has an early stage in-house pipeline consisting of selected therapeutic protein candidates which it has discovered; additional discoveries have been out-licensed for development.
Among Compugen's customers and partners are leading pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies, such as Abbott Laboratories, Diagnostic Products Corporation, Novartis, and Pfizer. Compugen has established a small-molecule drug discovery affiliate, called Keddem Bioscience, and an agricultural biotechnology affiliate, called Evogene.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on Wednesday, June 08, 2005
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