Shares in Compugen (Nasdaq:CGEN; TASE:CGEN) rose sharply yesterday, after the company announced a scientific breakthrough. The company's scientists have identified adenosine to inosine (A to I) RNA editing sites in the human transcriptome, increasing the number of known A to I editing sites from approximately 100 to more than 10,000. The discovery is being published in Nature Biotechnology.
RNA editing is a type of RNA modification in which small nucleotide changes occur after DNA has been transcribed into RNA. Although it is known that RNA editing is an essential factor for mammalian development and recent evidence has suggested that it may be a fairly common phenomenon, prior to yesterday's announcement very few RNA editing sites had been discovered, and it was generally believed to be impossible to systematically discover such sites with current experimental and computational procedures and tools.
The company's announcement said that in A to I RNA editing there is a site-specific conversion of adenosine to inosine. The deficiency or misregulation in this type of editing has been associated with a number of neurological diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or "Lou Gehrig's disease"), malignant gliomas, epilepsy, and depression. While many of the effects of RNA editing are still unknown, it is believed that it could significantly affect gene expression and regulation, and may provide a mechanism for controlling RNAi.
The results involve the discovery by Compugen's scientists of 12,723 A to I editing sites in 1637 genes. Examples of predicted editing sites in selected genes were experimentally validated by Compugen and in collaboration with Dr. Michael Jantsch's laboratories in the Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, University of Vienna, Austria. The research was done in cooperation with Professor Gidi Rechavi, Head of the Cancer Research Center of Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
"Today's announcement is further evidence of the uniqueness of Compugen's predictive approach and the value of incorporating ideas and methods from advanced mathematics, computer science and physics into life science," stated Compugen president and CEO Dr. Mor Amitai, "These deeper understandings provide Compugen with the opportunity to make novel putative therapeutic and diagnostic discoveries, and form the basis for the continued improvement of our predictive models and iterative research efforts, thereby increasing the probability of future discoveries through these efforts," Dr. Amitai concluded.
Shares in Compugen soared from Friday's close of $4.10 to $5.03 yesterday. In today's trading so far, the share has fallen back 2.78% to $4.89, giving the company a market cap of $131.29 million.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on July 20, 2004