CompleGen deal allows compound library access
industrialize the pre-clinical drug development process and reduce
the time to bring a drug to market. Under terms, CompleGen will
gain access to a chemical library consisting of compounds selected
for drug-like properties to discover and patent novel drugs.
Under the terms of the agreement, biotechnology company CompleGen, has exclusive rights in the Pharmaceutical field to discoveries that result from this library. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. CompleGen currently has a backlog of more than 160 XenoGene targets of pharmaceutical interest ready for screening.
The focus of these targets involves certain types of cancer, systemic fungal infections of immunocompromised patients and viral diseases.
The Dupont library is a prescreened collection of several hundred thousand small, organic chemicals. They were selected from a larger collection of 1.3million compounds, essentially all made at DuPont.
The DuPont library's unique selling point is its compounds are selected to be drug-like, not reactive or toxic, and are very diverse so as to cover a large "chemical space". Among other criteria, the "Lipinski rule of 5", well known for characterizing potential drugs, were applied to selecting this library.
The Lipinski rule of 5 (named because of its emphasis on the number 5 and multiples of 5), predicts the degree of adsorption and permeability of potential drug candidates, defining its druglike status.
Michael Tippie, vice president of business development at CompleGen told DrugResearcher.com: "The agreement is for two years. We have exclusive right to all discoveries that come out of our use of the DuPont library in the pharmaceutical field, both during the term and afterwards."
"No royalties are due on discoveries made in the pharmaceutical field."
The library is set to provide a significant contribution to speeding up drug discovery times. Tippie estimated the library could reduce the time to preclinical development from an industry average of 7 years to 2 years or less, and reduce the cost from an industry average of $120 million (€80 million) to less than $2 million (€13 million).
"By reducing the time it takes to get to preclinical development, we can also extend the effective life of a patent on the back end of a drug's life, and this can add substantially to its overall financial return."
"In a prior collaboration we identified (in a blinded fashion) a lead compound in six weeks, whereas the large pharma had spent three years to discover the same molecule. We have had similar results with other collaborations that lead us to expect we this kind of dramatic reduction in time and money is generalizable."
The discovery of specifically acting compounds shortens discovery phase and preclinical phase because time is not spent working with compounds that are active, but are not specific for the target (off-target side effects). The use of a specifically acting compound in cellular or animal models, results, more than likely, in an outcome based on the on-target effect of the drug.
Commenting on the future, Tippie stated the libray: "also represents our first big step in going from our early focus on genetic manipulation and perfection of the base technology into large scale chemical screening."
"We believe it will produce many high quality pharmaceutical leads per year for both our own development and for out licensing to other pharmaceutical organizations."
