Patent Law

Compugen's CGEN-671

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Compugen Ltd announced the discovery and experimental validation of a new drug target for the treatment of a type of cancer, sending its shares up as much as 41 percent in pre-market trade.

The compound, CGEN-671, for the treatment of multiple epithelial tumors, is a membrane splice variant of CD55, a known drug target for gastric cancer, for which monoclonal antibody therapeutics are in clinical development by others, the Israeli biotech company said in a statement.

Compugen has filed patent applications covering the splice variant, CGEN-671, and its various therapeutic and diagnostic utilities, it said.

IPBiz notes some recent US patent applications by Compugen:

US published application 20090317808, titled NOVEL NUCLEOTIDE AND AMINO ACID SEQUENCES AND METHODS OF USE THEREOF FOR DIAGNOSIS to Shirley Sameah-Greenwald, et al.

US published application 20090286957

MoneyCentral noted:

Initial experimental studies confirmed the existence of the predicted CGEN-671 transcript (mRNA) and demonstrated that, compared with normal tissue samples, it is highly expressed in colon carcinoma tissue. Furthermore, in these mRNA experiments, CGEN-671's expression level in various healthy tissues was up to 200 times lower than the expression level of the previously known cancer target CD55, suggesting that the Compugen discovered splice variant should be a superior drug target candidate for cancer treatment. In addition, the in silico prediction of CGEN-671 identified a unique sequence present in CGEN-671's extracellular domain that is not present in CD55. This sequence allows for the development of antibodies that specifically bind to CGEN-671 and do not recognize CD55.

[COMPUGEN LTD. ; 72 Pinchas Rosen Street 69512 Tel Aviv (IL)]

from biohealthinvestor:

Last week, the company announced a venture with Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)

Full post as published by IPBiz on December 28, 2009 (boomark / email).