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Alternative Splicing Project Officials at Exonhit Therapeutics (www.exonhit.com) have announced that the company has joined with several European researchers to start the Alternative Splicing Database (ASD) project. This undertaking represents a significant postgenomic initiative that highlights the importance of alternative splicing as a tool for the diagnosis of major human diseases such as cancer, neurodegeneration, and infertility. The ASD project, which brings together research teams from five European countries, will run for three years and is funded under the Fifth Framework Programme. As an initial step in characterizing alternative splicing, the researchers will collect previously published splicing data from human, mouse, fly, and rat studies and integrate them into the database. Simultaneously, consortium members will develop prognostic and diagnostic DNA microarrays of all splicing regulatory proteins and their isoforms as well as disease-related genomic signatures.
Clone System Licensing Agreem ent Life-science supply companies BD Biosciences Clontech (www.bd.com) and Open Biosystems (www. opensystems.com) recently announced that they have completed a commercial licensing agreement for the BD Creator gene cloning and expression system. Under the agreement, Open Biosystems was granted the nonexclusive worldwide rights to make, use, and sell clones and clone sets generated
using the cloning technology, starting with more than 1100 sequence-verified Human Freedom ORF clones created in a collaborative effort between BD Biosciences and the Harvard Institute of Proteomics (HIP, www.hip. harvard.edu). “Access to high-quality open reading frame clones is the essential requirement for entering into multiple assays that will provide a clear picture of protein function,” said Troy Moore, CTO for Open Biosystems. His comments were echoed by Joshua LaBaer, HIP director, who added, “Integrating the BD Creator gene cloning and expression system and the BD In-fusion PCR cloning system with the high-throughput cloning capabilities of the Institute of Proteomics at Harvard Medical School has resulted in the generation of a set of high-utility, high-quality, full-length, sequence-verified human clones that are likely to provide important information in the area of functional proteomics.”
Therapeutic Antibody Developm ent Officials at the U.K.-based antibody and protein engineering company Biovation Ltd. (www.biovation.co.uk), a member of the Merck KGaA group (www.merck. de), recently announced the signing of a research agreement with F. HoffmanLaRoche AG (www.roche. com). Under the agreement, Biovation will apply its proprietary Deimmunization technology for the generation of novel antibody-based biotherapeutics. In exchange, the company will receive research revenues
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Attacking SARS Recently, officials at the California-based biotechnology company Eidogen, Inc. (www.eidogen.com) announced that they had generated a high-resolution 3-D structure model of the protease enzyme from the coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and had deposited it into the PDB (ID: 1PA5). Company officials hope that this structure will facilitate the development of protease inhibitors to combat the spread of the disease. The researchers generated the model based on the homology of the enzyme to the protease from transmissible gastroenteritis virus (PDB ID: 1LVO). They then used the company’s Target Informatics Platform, a structural and comparative proteomics enterprise software platform, to compare the SARS protease to the same protein from the human rhinovirus that causes the common cold (PDB ID: 1CQQ). “Because of similarities spanning the P3 to P1⬘ substrate-binding subpockets, we expect that a number of compounds previously developed to inhibit the rhinovirus protease may show activity against the SARS protease,” said Chen-Chen Kan, Eidogen’s vice-president of Preclinical Drug Discovery.
and could earn licensing fees, milestone payments, and royalties on future sales should Roche pursue further development. The Biovation technology involves using single amino acid substitutions to identify and remove immunogenic T-cell epitopes from the antibodies. “We look forward to applying our Deimmunization technology to Roche’s leads in order to generate molecules whose clinical effectiveness is not compromised by immunogenicity,” said Frank Carr, Biovation’s president and CEO.
PatentforPrion Rem oval Recently, officials at the Biological Products (BP) Division of Bayer HealthCare LLC (www.bayerbiologicals. com) announced that they had received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) for a patent covering the use of their
Western Blot Assay to confirm the removal of pathogenic prion particles during the manufacture of human plasma-derived therapeutics. Although no clinical evidence to date suggests that human transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as Creutzfeldt−Jakob disease have been spread by blood- or plasma-derived products, Bayer BP researchers are working to eliminate any possible risk. “Because product safety is so crucial to all patients who rely on plasma-derived products, our scientists will continue to develop technologies that advance the entire biological products industry,” said Steve Petteway, vice president of Preclinical Research and Pathogen Safety for Bayer BP.
The Future Looks Bright According to market analysts at Frost & Sullivan (www.bio tech.frost.com), the biotech-
© 2003 American Chemical Society
nology and pharmaceutical industries’ increasing number of drug discovery initiatives using structure-based technologies is causing them to adopt a widening range of proteomic technologies. The report, World Structural Proteomics Market, shows that the protein purification and structure-determination markets respectively generated U.S.$87 million and $151.6 million in 2002, and it predicts that these numbers will rise to $221.4 million and $319.9 million by 2009. The report says that to sustain the current growth, companies will have to address issues such as the difficulty of obtaining highpurity proteins and the great expense of high-field instruments. As part of that effort, manufacturers will have to increase awareness of the benefits the often costly equipment offers corporate and academic researchers. Similarly, according to Frost & Sullivan research analyst Sinead Igoe, “Nurturing early access agreements with leading research institutes will help ensure commercial success.”
Japanese Cancer Collaboration Officials of Genedata AG (www.genedata.com) and the National Cancer Center Japan (NCC, www.ncc.go.jp) recently announced a collaborative agreement for proteomics-based cancer research. Under the terms of the agreement, the NCC has licensed Genedata’s Impressionist system to analyze the large amounts of 2-DEderived data generated using the Amersham Biosciences Ettan DIGE technology (www.amershambiosciences. com). The NCC works closely with hospitals to clarify the basic mechanisms of cancer development and to apply this information to methods of cancer prognosis, diagno-
sis, and treatment. “We are working with many different cancer samples from clinics as well as from cell lines,” said Tadashi Kondo, section head of the NCC Biology Division. “Therefore, we need sophisticated computational systems designed to handle this level of real-life complexity.”
Biogen Licenses Xenogen Technology Officials at Xenogen Corp. (www.xenogen.com), which specializes in real-time in vivo imaging, recently announced the signing of an agreement with the Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company Biogen Inc. (www.biogen.com) to evaluate Xenogen’s biophotonic platform in Biogen’s drug discovery program. As part of the agreement, Biogen will also receive access to some of Xenogen’s Bioware cells (bacterial, fungal, and tumor cell systems that have been modified to emit light) and bioluminescent in vivo models that emit light when target genes are activated. “We believe that our real-
time in vivo imaging technology platform provides a powerful tool that can enhance drug discovery and development,” said Pamela Contag, Xenogen’s president. “We are very pleased that an industry leader like Biogen has chosen to access our technology platform.”
BreastCancer Biom arkerAgreem ent Surrey, BC-based Genesis Bioventures, Inc. (GBI, www.gnsbio.com) recently announced that it had signed a licensing agreement with the University of Michigan (www.umich.edu) for the exclusive worldwide rights to diagnostic uses of the mammastatin technology. Mammastatin is a protein present in the blood of most healthy women and absent or appearing at low levels in most breast cancer patients or women known to be at high risk for developing breast cancer. The agreement secures the technology rights for GBI and its wholly owned subsidiary Biomedical Diagnostics LLC (www. bio-diagnostics.com). GBI
An Array ofHope According to a new report issued by analysts at Front Line Strategic Consulting, Inc. (www.frontlinesmc.com), the worldwide market for array technologies should experience a 15% overall compound annual growth rate over the next five years as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies continue to seek more efficient and cost-effective tools to identify drug targets. Given the performance of the sector to date, that growth rate projects to a market of U.S.$1.6 billion by 2008. Although DNAbased microarrays continue to dominate the array landscape, having an estimated 84% market share in 2003, the report suggests that protein arrays will probably experience strong growth as high-throughput proteomics becomes more widely adopted for target identification and validation research. According to the report, the factors driving market growth and development include array data standardization, robust databases, segment consolidation, and the increasing importance of clinical diagnostics. “While microarrays are advantageous in facilitating high-throughput screening, certain challenges remain, such as accuracy and quality of data, that require further attention,” said company analyst Charles Chang.The current worldwide geographical market breakdown is as follows: United States, 65%; Europe, 20%; Japan, 10%; and the rest of the world, 5%.
officials hope that the mammastatin serum assay will serve to identify any woman’s risk for developing breast cancer, whereas most tumor marker assays can only determine whether a tumor is already present. “This [agreement] will allow [GBI] to have nonrestrictive development and commercialization capabilities and will open the door to new strategic alliances and scientific collaborations,” said GBI Chair Greg McCartney. “We believe that the novel concept of diagnostic tests for risk assessment of all types of cancer will become routine in the medical field and be a standard part of every person’s annual physical checkup in the near future.”
Proteom ic Blueprint Officials of the Blueprint Initiative research program recently announced the release of the first complete public proteomic database curation standards document, which outlines the standards and processes by which scientists are building the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND, www.bind.ca). BIND, which includes data from a variety of organisms, and its associated software tools are freely available to both academic and corporate researchers worldwide. “We had to stop and evaluate what we were doing and come up with a well-defined standardized set of curator expectations,” said curation manager Cheryl Wolting. The initiative’s CDN$29 million, threeyear budget is being provided by Genome Canada (www.genomecanada.ca) in partnership with industry partners Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), MDS Proteomics (www.mdsproteo mics.com), and Foundry Networks (www.foundrynet. com), as well as other government sources.
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