Drug discovery platform developer Compugen Ltd. (Nasdaq: CGEN; TASE: CGEN) announced today the development and validation of its Intracellular Drug Delivery (IDD) discovery platform for identification of cell penetrating peptides.
The delivery of biological molecules across selectively permeable cell membranes and into the cells represents a major challenge for the pharmaceutical industry.
Important classes of biological drugs now under development, such as therapeutic peptides and siRNA, need to enter the cell to be effective. Since most are unlikely to cross the surrounding protective membranes of cells on their own, they will require some type of delivery methodology. Cell penetrating peptides offer the opportunity to provide the required intracellular targeting of therapy, either by delivery of a therapeutic molecule as “cargo”, or by the peptide itself.
The cellular membrane acts as a protective barrier from dangerous compounds and is essential for cellular homeostasis. However, it also prevents large and charged therapeutic molecules from achieving intracellular localization and thereby addressing a vast number of targets believed to have therapeutic potential.
Compugen vice president of R&D Dr. Zurit Levine said, “The efficient intracellular delivery of therapeutic molecules is already presenting a hurdle for the biopharma industry, and will only become more of a problem with the advancement of intracellular target based therapeutic technologies such as RNAi, peptides and other classes of biological molecules. We expect our Intracellular Drug Delivery discovery platform to play a key role in both meeting this challenge and providing the potential for dual function peptides thereby contributing to a new and fruitful era of intracellular approaches to therapy.”
Compugen said that the platform has already predicted and selected in silico twenty novel peptides, which then demonstrated the predicted cell penetrating properties in initial experimental validation studies.
Shares in Compugen closed yesterday at $4.93, giving a market cap of $142.24 million. Over the past 52 weeks, the shares have traded between $0.40 and $5.86.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 16, 2010
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2010