CLEVELAND, March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Athersys Inc. and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) today announced the formation of a functional genomics collaboration to discover and functionally validate novel drug targets that play an important role in cancer and inflammation. Athersys scientists will work with researchers under the direction of Dr. George R. Stark, Chairman of the Lerner Research Institute at CCF, to rapidly and efficiently identify novel drug targets that regulate certain cell-signaling and disease pathways. The development of drugs that target cell-signaling pathways is currently a primary area of focus for many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies due to its potential to treat serious and debilitating diseases. Athersys has an exclusive option to commercialize novel therapeutics that result from the collaboration. Dr. John Harrington, executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Athersys, will discuss this collaboration today at the CHI Genome Tri-Conference in San Francisco.
Researchers at CCF will apply Athersys' RAGE (Random Activation of Gene Expression) technology as a method to decipher complex signaling pathways within human cells and identify and validate drug targets that regulate these pathways. RAGE is a proprietary technology that Athersys uses to create comprehensive, genome wide protein expression libraries for applications in functional genomics and proteomics. Since RAGE activated genes are tagged, researchers can correlate expression of a particular gene with a specific disease process.
``A critical challenge facing many pharmaceutical companies and leading academic research centers is the ability to rapidly and precisely identify functional drug targets and understand how they impact complex cellular signaling pathways,'' said Dr. Gil Van Bokkelen, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Athersys. ``Our RAGE technology provides a way to survey the entire human genome in order to rapidly identify and functionally validate potential drug targets, accelerating the development of treatments for important diseases, making Athersys a leader in functional genomics. Athersys' strategy is to continue to establish collaborations with leading academic research centers, such as the Cleveland Clinic, as well as with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.''
Researchers at CCF and Athersys are working to identify novel regulators of pathways in cells for two important proteins, NF-kappaB, or Nuclear Factor-kappaB, and p53. Based on current understanding of the roles of these proteins in human biology, drugs that inhibit or activate specific targets in their pathways may provide new approaches in the treatment of a number of serious diseases, including cancer and inflammatory disorders. NF-kappaB is a transcription factor that is involved in a range of cellular phenomena, including inflammation, antigen presentation, immunity, cytokine production, apoptosis and cancer. P53 is a tumor suppressor protein that is mutated or inactivated in more than half of all human tumors. In the other half, it is postulated that components of p53 signaling pathways may be defective.
``My laboratory at the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic has been searching for novel suppressors for some time by applying the traditional method of introducing cDNA libraries into cells with constitutive activation of these pathways and then recovering specific cDNAs that suppress p53 or NF-kappaB expression. The problem with this approach is that it is still very difficult to get access to cDNAs from genes that are expressed in rare tissues, at very low levels or that are only expressed in response to certain stimuli,'' said Dr. George R. Stark. ``By using RAGE to make genome wide protein expression libraries in our mutant cells, we hope to quickly and efficiently associate biological function with expression of a specific RAGE activated protein. This could be a great advance in our ability to further the understanding of cellular disease pathways.'' |
