Bio Screening Industry News

GPC Biotech, a public company, is primarily focused on the research and development of cancer drugs. Ingenium is a private company focused on the treatment of pain. The collaboration sees both companies working towards establishing proof of concept for the activity of specific kinase inhibitors using animal models, and will cover several disease areas. The goal is to rapidly advance novel drug targets towards clinical testing.

The grant was transferred from Axxima Pharmaceuticals to GPC Biotech and involves collaborative work initiated between Axxima and Ingenium. GPC Biotech acquired Axxima’s assets earlier this year after the company filed for insolvency in December 2004. Axxima was a drug discovery company in the field of kinase inhibition.

Dr Bernd Seizinger, CEO of GPC Biotech, said, “We are very pleased with the value already being generated by the new employees we hired and the expanded capabilities brought in through the Axxima acquisition.” Dr Seizinger believes the funding gained from the German Ministry as a part of the acquisition will further the company’s expertise and drug producing potential.

Ingenium is also pleased with the joint venture, describing the collaboration as providing great potential for future research.

Yahoo! Finance - Pharmaceuticals Sector

Dortmund (April 14, 2005) - Protagen closed a first financing round with the VC S-VentureCapital Dortmund for the expansion of its protein biochip business. In the course of this capital influx, positions in the management and the board of directors have been reorganized.

Dr. Stefan Muellner has taken over the position of the CSO in the board of Protagen AG. Dr. Muellner brings a lot of experience from positions in R&D management at Henkel and Hoechst. He is responsible at Protagen for Research & Development, production, patents and licencing and quality assurance as well as for the business units Protein Biochips and Pharma Actives. Dr. Christoph Huels keeps the position of the CEO and chairman of the board and is responsible for the business units Analytics and Bio-IT as well as for marketing, sales, business development, administration and human resources.

Dr. Muellner has taken over the position from Prof. Dr. Helmut E. Meyer. Prof. Meyer is leaving the executive board of Protagen and will join the scientific advisory board and the board of directors. He will replace Dr. Achim Riemann, former CEO of Arthur D. Little Germany, who will leave the board. Prof. Meyer is concentrating in the future on his activities in the Medical Proteom Center of the Ruhr-University Bochum and his chair in the world wide human brain proteom initiative of the HUPO and is therefore resigning the active position at Protagen.

About Protagen AG
Protagen AG, Dortmund, founded 1999, is a leading Biotechnology company operating in four business units (BUs): Analytics, Bio-IT, Protein Biochips, and Pharma Actives. The Integrated Proteomics Technology Platform (IPT-Platform) as a broad Proteomics expertise is utilized to offer successfully high-quality fee-for-service in protein analytics (also GMP-conform) and proteome studies in the BU Analytics, as well as software developments for Proteomics to the market. Currently, the BUs Protein Biochips and Pharma Actives are heavily build up. In 2005 Protagen will introduce new products from its BU Protein Biochips under the brandname UNIchips® into the market.

Complete pipeline of novel, competitive, clinical-stage products
addressing major in-hospital and out-patient thrombosis markets
— Extensive portfolio of pre-clinical and discovery-stage
programmes and platforms targeting cardiovascular diseases
— Complementary expertise with resulting competences in discovery,
development and commercialisation of small molecules and protein
therapeutics
— Blue-chip shareholder base (including 3i and HealthCap) and
strong management team

LONDON, and MARTINSRIED, Germany, April 11, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) — Trigen:

Trigen Holdings plc and ProCorde GmbH announced today that they have merged their interests into Trigen Holdings AG. The combination of Trigen and ProCorde creates a leader in cardiovascular drug discovery and development, focussing on thrombosis and vascular dysfunction. The company’s expanded product pipeline includes Trigen’s existing clinical stage candidates, TGN 255 and TGN 167, and ProCorde’s PR-15, which is expected to enter the clinic later this year. The company also has an extensive portfolio of exciting pre-clinical and discovery stage programmes targeting thrombosis, atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular pathologies. In addition it will benefit from two established discovery platforms, SIGSCREEN(r) and THROMSCAN(r) which have been applied in collaborations between ProCorde and a number of “Big Pharma” companies. The products, programmes and technologies have all been discovered in the laboratories of either Trigen or ProCorde, have been developed in-house and continue to be controlled by the combined entity.

Dr. Sanjay Kakkar, the current CEO of Trigen will become the new group CEO. Barry Knight Trigen’s Finance Director will become the group Finance Director and both will serve on the Management Board of Trigen Holdings AG. Dr. Goran Ando (previously CEO of Celltech) has been appointed Chairman of the Supervisory Board; the other members include Charles Klotz (representing Canasta Group Ltd), Dr. Magnus Persson (representing HealthCap) and Dr Erich Schlick (former head of R&D at BASF Pharma and representing 3i). The merged company will benefit from one of the strongest management teams in European biotechnology, drawing its Executive Management Team from the senior executives of both companies. The new company will maintain current sites in the U.K. and Germany for the foreseeable future.

TGN 255 is a novel intravenous small-molecule Direct Thrombin Inhibitor (DTI) being developed as a predictable and safer alternative for anti-coagulation in hospital settings. TGN 167 is an orally bioavailable DTI competitively positioned for outpatient anti-coagulation markets with blockbuster potential. PR-15 is a novel anti-platelet protein with the potential to treat arterial thrombosis occurring during acute coronary syndromes without the bleeding risk associated with existing agents.

The combined headcount of the new entity will be 50 with a broad and complementary array of skills enabling the company to execute efficiently programmes from early discovery stage through to late-stage clinical development and commercialisation. The merged company will benefit from in-house discovery and development expertise in small molecule and protein therapeutics, bringing together existing highly-skilled chemistry and biology teams in the U.K. and Germany.

Dr. Gotz Munch, ProCorde’s CEO commented, “We are delighted to have found such a complementary partner in Trigen. Cardiovascular diseases, and in particular thrombosis and vascular dysfunction are the world’s largest cause of premature death and disability. There is a real need for an industry champion to raise awareness and address the problem head-on through innovative research, drug discovery and development.” Dr. Munch will continue to lead the combined company’s operations in Munich and is a member of the Executive Management Team in the new company.

Dr. Sanjay Kakkar, Trigen’s CEO added, “The combination of Trigen’s and ProCorde’s pipelines, technologies and skills provides in a single biotech company the opportunity to target the key components of a major therapeutic area to produce competitive products with significant market opportunity. It is of interest that this has been achieved in Europe where the need for consolidation in biotechnology has been recognised for some time but finding a partnership that builds on strengths like this is rare and valuable. We are excited and positive about our future prospects and confident about building a great biotech success from this promising base.”

Dr. Sanjay Kakkar will be presenting the newly merged company at the BioSquare Conference in Lyons, France on Thursday 14th April at 4pm in Rhone 3A, Level 1.

Trigen was founded in 1992, initially to pursue a research programme on small molecule coagulation protease inhibitors conducted at the world-renowned Thrombosis Research Institute (TRI) in London. In 2002 it absorbed the drug discovery operations of the TRI and became a free-standing company. Trigen has subsequently successfully identified new drug candidates and taken them into clinical development and has expanded its operations to become a leading U.K. biotechnology company focussed on the discovery and development of novel drugs for the management of occlusive and inflammatory cardiovascular diseases. The lead programme, comprising a series of small molecule direct thrombin inhibitors (DTIs) for the prevention and treatment of thrombosis, is in clinical development in both intravenous and oral formulations. In addition Trigen has other programmes, focussed on thrombosis and ischaemia-related diseases, in preclinical development and discovery. For further information, please visit http://www.trigen.co.uk

ProCorde was founded in 2000 to exploit unique scientific knowledge of the human platelet brought to the company by its founders. Since then, ProCorde has successfully built two platform technologies, SIGSCREEN(r) and THROMSCAN(r) for the validation of new targets relevant to atherosclerosis, thrombosis and heart failure. ProCorde has successfully employed these platforms to offer target validation services to pharmaceutical companies worldwide. In addition, ProCorde began establishing its own proprietary drug pipeline focussing in particular on acute coronary syndrome and atherosclerosis. ProCorde’s lead programme, PR-15, is a lesion-specific anti-platelet agent with potential application in the treatment of acute coronary syndromes and coronary interventions. For further information, please visit http://www.procorde.de

Source:Trigen

Groton, CT, New York, NY, and Research Triangle Park, NC.: April 7, 2005 –
– As part of an effort to strengthen our nation’s bio-defenses against an outbreak of smallpox, LifePharms, Inc., the Sloan-Kettering Institute of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and The Natural Products Laboratory of RTI International have received a 5-year, $5 million research grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The organizations will combine their expertise in drug discovery, natural product chemistry and antiviral research to discover small-molecule therapeutics for poxvirus infections. The project will use enzymes and proteins derived from the closely related but harmless vaccinia virus as a surrogate for the variola virus. LifePharms’ natural product extract collection will be screened at both the Sloan-Kettering Institute and at LifePharms for activity against these targets leading to drugs which the collaboration intends to develop.

LifePharms, Inc. is a biotechnology company headquartered at the University of Connecticut @ Avery Point in Groton. E. Edward Mena, President and Chief Scientific Officer of LifePharms, Inc. is the principle investigator of this industry-university collaborative project, which also involves Stewart Shuman at the Sloan-Kettering Institute and Nicholas Oberlies at RTI International.

The grant is part of the biodefense initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the possible re-emergence of smallpox by the release of the variola virus is one of the most feared bio-terrorist scenarios. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop potent antiviral therapeutics that would easily be administered to exposed individuals and would curtail or eliminate the development and spread of the disease

LifePharms, Inc. is a graduate of the Southeastern Connecticut Enterprise Region (seCTer) Incubator program. LifePharms’ research focuses on discovering novel, natural product-derived compounds from its natural produce collection. This collection consists of over 16,000 fungal samples collected from sites throughout the United States. Estimates indicate that 40% of all drugs have been discovered from natural sources and an even greater percent are compounds derived from natural products. The company recently announced research collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Products Research Utilization Unit at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS. LifePharms, Inc. has several other research collaborations with government laboratories, universities and research institutions throughout the country in the therapeutic areas of cancer, infectious diseases and human antifungal research.

The Sloan-Kettering Institute is the research arm of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; the oldest and largest institution devoted to the prevention, patient care, research and education in cancer. Dr. Stewart Shuman, a Professor in the Molecular Biology Program is a widely recognized poxvirus researcher. His work on the vaccinia virus has focused on several poxvirus-specific enzymes, which are potential targets for drugs.

The Natural Products laboratory at RTI International has a long and distinguished history of natural products research, which includes the discovery of Taxol, and Camptothecin, two of the most universally used anticancer agents on the market.

www.lifepharms.com