Aurora Biosciences Announces Drug Discovery and DevelopmentCollaboration With the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
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SAN DIEGO, May 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Aurora Biosciences Corporation (Nasdaq: ABSC) announced today that it has entered into a significant drug discovery and development collaboration with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation ("CFF"). This agreement, a five-year collaboration focused on the identification of novel therapies for the treatment of cystic fibrosis ("CF"), represents the largest contract ever awarded by a voluntary health organization for drug discovery. Aurora will employ its assay development and screening services, Aurora's chemical library of approximately 400,000 compounds, Aurora's secondary screening and lead optimization capabilities and Aurora's genomic technologies for additional target and assay development. The collaboration includes the development of an assay for, and screening of, the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator ("CFTR"), a protein that is defective in CF patients.
Under the collaboration, Aurora will utilize its diverse discovery technology platform to provide an integrated and multi-faceted approach to the discovery of new therapeutics for CF. The Aurora-CFF drug discovery and development initiative includes many of Aurora's advanced technologies, such as Voltage Sensor Probe (VSP) technologies for assay development, UHTSS(TM) and VIPR(TM) technology for screening, Metabolite(TM) technology for secondary screening, and GeneBLAzer(TM) and GenomeScreen(TM) technology for target identification and validation. The initiative also includes strategies to accelerate lead optimization by Aurora and the development of two to three clinical candidates.
CFF will fund the Aurora-CFF initiative through technology access fees for non-exclusive access to Aurora's assay, screening and chemistry technologies and fees for ongoing scientific support. Committed funding payments and project progress payments received by Aurora could total approximately $30 million over the course of the collaboration, before clinical milestone payments. Aurora and CFF have also agreed to a co-commercialization arrangement that includes commercialization of promising candidate drugs resulting from the program in the CF and pulmonary fields, with revenue sharing on any marketed products.
Stuart J.M. Collinson, Ph.D., Aurora's chairman, chief executive officer and president stated, "This partnership with CFF opens exciting new doors to apply Aurora's state-of-the-art technology to the discovery of novel therapies in the fight against cystic fibrosis." Dr. Collinson continues, "The important science that CFF has funded over the years in university labs and medical centers has created new opportunities for therapies. To convert these opportunities quickly and efficiently into compounds that can be tested in the clinic requires skill sets, technologies and expertise that may be beyond those in the basic research lab. These are the capabilities Aurora brings to this partnership."
"The Aurora-CFF initiative represents a novel strategy to fight a terrible disease. This multi-year collaboration has the primary objective of rapidly producing preclinical candidates for CF therapies, including drugs aimed at the cause of the disease," said Robert J. Beall, Ph.D., president and chief executive officer of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. "As our understanding of the disease process in CF has increased, we have identified a number of potential points for therapeutic intervention that we would like to attack with Aurora. Aurora's ability to accelerate drug discovery convinced us to use their premier drug discovery platform and recognize their organization as a primary CF center for drug development while concurrently leveraging our other relationships and clinical and basic science base in academia."
"We are pleased that CFF has chosen to capitalize on our initial progress, which began last year, by increasing its commitment to Aurora's scientists and technologies," commented Paul A. Negulescu, Ph.D., Aurora's vice president, discovery biology. "CF is a complex disease and the new collaboration will be looking much more broadly at strategies to treat CF and alleviate its symptoms. We believe it is possible that some of our findings will have implications not only for CF, but for other pulmonary and non-pulmonary diseases as well."
CF is the most common fatal genetic disease in the U.S. among Caucasians. It is caused by a defect in the CFTR gene, which encodes a protein that is important for the appropriate function of cells lining the lungs and the digestive tract. Patients with a defective CFTR gene develop dangerously thick sticky mucus that leads to chronic and eventually fatal lung infections; CF also interferes with digestion. Although there is no cure at this time, CFF-supported researchers have made great progress in understanding the effects of CF and how the disease develops. There is now a real opportunity to translate these breakthroughs into promising new treatments. See www.cff.org for more information.
Aurora designs, develops and commercializes advanced drug discovery technologies, services and systems to accelerate the discovery of new medicines. The Company's core technologies include a broad portfolio of proprietary fluorescence assay technologies, including its GeneBLAzer(TM) and VIPR(TM) technologies, its functional genomics GenomeScreen(TM) program, its automated master compound store, the AMCS, and its ultra-high throughput screening system (UHTSS(TM) Platform) and subsystems to miniaturize and automate drug screening and profiling assays derived from those technologies. Aurora technologies have been commercially validated by over 15 major life sciences companies and research organizations, including American Home Products, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Glaxo Wellcome, Genentech, Inc., Eli Lilly & Co., Merck & Co., Inc., Johnson & Johnson NV Organon Laboratories, Pfizer, Inc., and Warner-Lambert Company, in the form of commercialization agreements for discovery services, licenses or systems. For additional information on Aurora's services and products, please contact Sales and Marketing via email at marcom@aurorabio.com.
Statements in this press release that are not strictly historical, such as statements about the Company's ability to discover and commercialize drug candidates as a result of its collaboration with CFF, are "forward-looking" statements which involve a high degree of technological and competitive risks and uncertainties that exist in the Company's operations and business environment. Such statements are only predictions and the Company's actual events or results may differ materially from those projected in such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to differences include risks associated with the Company's ability to develop an assay for CF or to identify potential leads through the use of such assays, the Company's new and uncertain technology, dependence on patents and proprietary rights and dependence on pharmaceutical and biotechnology collaborations. Other factors that could cause or contribute to differences are more fully described in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K/A for the fiscal year ended December 31, 1999, and subsequent Form 10-Q's as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For additional corporate information, visit the Aurora website at aurorabio.com.
GeneBLAzer(TM), GenomeScreen(TM), Metabolite(TM), UHTSS(TM) and VIPR(TM) are trademarks of Aurora Biosciences Corporation.
SOURCE Aurora Biosciences Corporation
CO: Aurora Biosciences Corporation; Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
ST: California
IN: HEA BIO
SU: CON
05/31/2000 06:00 EDT prnewswire.com |
