Firm believes in silico platform gives it an edge over traditional techniques.
Compugen has selected nine products using its platform for identifying new indications for existing drug molecules.
Over 100 potential new therapeutic products based on new indications for existing drugs were initially identified, according to Compugen. After applying various criteria, including an intellectual property review process, nine were chosen. They will be applied to diseases that substantially differ from the indications the drugs are already approved to treat.
The platform analyzes information and raw data from several different experimental, drug and disease-specific sources, including gene expression from human chip experiments, known or predicted protein networks and associations between genes, and gene regulation data.
Drug repositioning usually involves some form of high-throughput experimentation whereby the drug of interest is screened in a variety of different disease and/or tissue conditions. In comparison, the Compugen in silico platform is designed to identify those drugs predicted to have new indications from among all available drugs either in commercial use or undergoing clinical trials.
Compugen reports that while its approach can be used in the traditional manner, this may not always yield the best or even an acceptable commercial opportunity. If a new indication is identified for the drug of interest in drug repositioning, there is no reason to expect that this specific drug will be the best available drug for that new indication, the company explains.
The engine is based in large part on a computational biology platform, called MED, which allows the integration and subsequent querying of data of multiple types and sources.
