NEWS OF THE W EEK
ASTRAZENECA TO BUY ARDEA PHARMACEUTICALS: Smallmolecule drug firm will bring a late-stage gout treatment
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STRAZENECA has struck a deal to buy the
small-molecule drug company Ardea Biosciences for $1.26 billion. San Diego-based Ardea has three compounds in development: two that target gout and one in the oncology area. Ardea’s most advanced candidate, lesinurad, is a selective inhibitor of URAT1, a transporter in kidney cells that regulates uric acid excretion from the body. Chronic hyperuricemia, or abnormally elevated uric acid levels in the blood, is a symptom of gout, a debilitating and progressive disease that affects the connective tissue in joints. Lesinurad is currently in Phase III clinical trials, and Ardea anticipates filing for regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe in 2014. AstraZeneca plans to develop the drug for China and Japan as well. From the transaction, the British firm will also gain a next-generation
BLOOD TYPING MADE SIMPLE BIOANALYSIS: Paper-based device spells out blood type
ANGEW. CHEM. INT. ED.
A postage-stampsized paper test can determine all eight blood types.
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OR ANYONE who has ever wondered what their
blood type is, a new paper-based device will literally write the answer, providing an inexpensive and unambiguous way to determine blood type (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI: 10.1002/anie.201201822). The presence or absence of certain antigens on red blood cells determines a person’s blood type. Specific antibodies will react with these antigens and make the red blood cells clump. Researchers led by Wei Shen, of Australia’s Monash University, use an ink-jet printer to apply these antibodies in the shapes of letters A, B, and X as well as a vertical line onto postagestamp-sized pieces of paper towel. O and rhesus-negWWW.CEN-ONLIN E .ORG
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URAT1 inhibitor, RDEA3170, which is in Phase I development. Ardea licensed its oncology candidate to Bayer HealthCare in 2009. According to Ardea, about 15 million people in the world’s major markets were diagnosed with gout in 2009. Treatment options are limited, however; FDA has approved only two new hyperuricemia medications in the past 40 years, Ardea says. The prospects for addressing this unmet need are attractive enough that in April, Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical agreed to pay at least $800 million for Philadelphia-based URL Pharma. Specializing in gout therapies, URL had about $600 million in sales in 2011, with more than $430 million of the total from its gout drug Colcrys. Takeda sells the uric acid-lowering drug Uloric. In its pursuit of the gout market, AstraZeneca will pay a 50% premium over Ardea’s recent stock market value. Although Ardea has no product sales, it does have about $250 million in cash, much of which it amassed in February from a $158 million stock offering. The deal is “a good use of cash for AstraZeneca and an attractive fit for AstraZeneca’s global primary care business,” Leerink Swann stock analyst Seamus Fernandez told clients in a recent note. His opinion is founded on positive Phase III results and the view that lesinurad is considered the most attractive among drugs in latestage development for treating gout.—ANN THAYER
ative blood types don’t have antigens that react with these antibodies, so the researchers preprint an O in the same spot as the X and a horizontal line intersecting the vertical line on the paper in red waterproof ink. Place a few drops of blood on the paper, wash it with saline, and in under a minute, the blood type appears in text. For example, if the blood type is A-positive, antigens will react with printed A antibody to produce a clump of red blood cells in the shape of the letter A and with antibody in the vertical line to form a + sign. The antigens will also cause a red X to form over the preprinted O. For O-negative blood, no reaction with the antibodies would occur, and the preprinted paper would simply read O above a – sign. Shen got the idea after seeing the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s book “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” in which the characters query a diary that responds in writing. Shen realized technology he had previously helped develop could be modified to respond in writing to the question: What’s my blood type? “The ability to form letters that directly report blood type makes it possible for nonexperts to interpret the results rapidly, which is of particular importance in rapid-response scenarios,” comments John D. Brennan, an expert in bioanalytical chemistry at McMaster University in Ontario. “This method also shows the advantage of implementing simple ink-jet printers to produce paper assays rather than conventional lateral flow printers, which produce only lines.”—BETHANY HALFORD
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