Not sure how this fits, but certainly a relief to have in hand.
Monday December 4, 7:45 am Eastern Time
Press Release
SOURCE: Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Rigel Receives U.S. Patent for Unique Method of Genomic Screening
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Dec. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: RIGL - news) today announced the issuance of U.S. Patent No. 6,153,380, entitled, ``Methods For Screening For Transdominant Intracellular Effector Peptides and RNA Molecules,'' which provides methods for creating, delivering and screening for genomic probes that are capable of altering the disease behavior of virtually any mammalian cell. This technology represents a new and unique method for rapid and efficient genomic screening and is an important component of Rigel's integrated approach to drug discovery.
Rigel's method of genomic screening provides two significant advantages over conventional techniques. First, it allows for the creation, introduction and screening of the genomic probes inside the cell in a single step rather than traditional approaches which rely on making the library of potential probes in one step and then introducing the probes extracellularly in another. In addition, Rigel's approach does not require prior knowledge of the cell's disease pathway. Rigel's approach inherently focuses only on those intracellular targets which have an important role in a disease pathway because their interaction causes a desired biologic outcome (i.e., prevents a disease stimulus from leading to a disease response).
``The fact that this is a single-step, in vitro approach to screening that requires no prior knowledge of the disease pathway contributes to very rapid and efficient identification of targets that could be useful for the treatment of a broad array of diseases,'' said Donald G. Payan, M.D., chief scientific officer for Rigel. ``This ability to very quickly identify functionally validated drug targets makes Rigel an attractive partner to many pharmaceutical companies that need to supplement their R&D pipelines in as efficient a manner as possible.''
The patented technology relates to Rigel's retroviral systems, which begins with the introduction of hundreds of millions of different retroviral vectors into each of hundreds of millions of different mammalian cells. Each vector contains the instructions to make one of hundreds of millions of different peptide or protein probes within the cell. Once a probe is introduced into each cell, Rigel stimulates the cell in a manner known to produce a disease-like response, and then detects those cells in which the probes interacted with a target inside the cells causing the cells to change their response. The probes are put back into other cell types to confirm function and identify the range of its effect. Rigel then uses traditional approaches to proteomics, high-throughput screening and medicinal chemistry to identify and develop small molecule drug candidates that can be tested in preclinical studies.
The technology covered under the patent was invented by Garry P. Nolan, Ph.D., a Rigel co-founder and Associate Professor, Departments of Molecular Pharmacology and Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University Medical Center, and S. Michael Rothenberg, M.D., Ph.D. student, Program in Cancer Biology and Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. |
