Angiotech and CombinatoRx in drug development deal
development agreement with CombinatoRx that aims to focus on drug
treatments for peripheral vascular, coronary, and orthopaedic
disorders.
The collaboration will expand Angiotech's library of potential drug compounds by providing Angiotech with access to CombinatoRx's compound library of over 2 million combinations of known pharmaceuticals in areas such as vascular, orthopaedic and general surgery, including peripheral artery disease, coronary stenting and joint diseases.
In addition, there will also be a joint research collaboration of up to five years designed to combine CombinatoRx's combination drug discovery platform and capabilities with Angiotech's know-how in local drug selection and delivery.
Under the terms of the agreement, Angiotech will pay CombinatoRx $27 million (€22.7 million) in cash, and will make a simultaneous $15 million investment in CombinatoRx.
"Our relationship with CombinatoRx provides us access to a large library of combination compounds," said William Hunter, president and CEO of Angiotech Pharmaceuticals.
"We believe there are several CombinatoRx combination compounds to treat local vascular and orthopaedic disease and that may be of use in treatment of restenosis in coronary stent applications."
CombinatoRx uses a high throughput screening system to discover proprietary combinations of two or more drugs that are able to affect important pharmaceutical pathways, achieving greater efficacy than can be achieved through the use of a single drug alone.
"Given that many drugs interact with one another in unexpected ways, we believe it will become ever more important to conduct such a scientific approach to discover the best pharmaceutical solutions for local interventional therapies," said Hunter.
In addition, CombinatoRx will receive milestone payments and royalties from Angiotech for each combination pharmaceutical compound successfully developed and commercialized by Angiotech or Angiotech's commercialisation partners.
The intellectual property developed during the research collaboration will be jointly owned, but exclusively licensed to Angiotech in its fields of drug-device combinations and certain local drug delivery products, and to CombinatoRx primarily for systemic therapies, and for a limited number of drug-device combination fields.
"This collaboration represents a new spectrum of pharmaceutical options," said Rui Avelar, senior vice president of Medical Affairs and Communications of Angiotech.
"This approach to drug discovery enables us to find combinations that are not simply additive in effect but potentially superior in their combined form."
